by David Nasaw
The progress he had made at Rusk was not maintained. He had begun to walk, but doing so required that he wear a heavy, uncomfortable brace. It was so much easier to get around by wheelchair. The decision to suspend his rehabilitation work was, in large part, his own—and his family accepted it. If he preferred not to suffer the indignities of trying to walk and the pain of wearing his brace, so be it. They were not going to argue with him, especially as they did not know how long he had left.
The prognosis was not good. The second summer of his illness, he had two separate incidents of cardiac arrests. Rose suffered most from the uncertainty, from never knowing when the alarms in his room would go off or if she would wake in the morning to find him gone. She had spent their married life traveling but now felt obligated to stay close by.
He had all his life prided himself on his appearance, on his perfectly tailored business suits and leisure suits, on his military posture, and on the smile he could turn on whenever it was needed. He had been a handsome young man, and he’d aged gracefully into the most handsome of older men. The stroke reversed all that. He was now—and he had to have known it—a twisted, gaunt old skeleton, bound to a wheelchair, unable to make himself understood. He was faced, as was his family, with the most distasteful choice between isolating himself in his room or going out and subjecting himself to the frightened or pitying stares of friends and onlookers.
The family tried not to interrupt the routines that had defined his life. He traveled back and forth, as he had when he was healthy, from Hyannis Port in late spring to Palm Beach in December. He made regular trips to Chicago, where he visited the Merchandise Mart and received maintenance therapy from Dr. Betts, who had moved there from the Rusk Institute. He continued to stop over for a few days in New York City on his trips to and from Palm Beach and made a point of visiting at his Park Avenue office for business updates and lunching at his favorite restaurant, La Caravelle. “He wanted his old table in the middle of the restaurant, so they’d wheel him in his wheelchair and move him onto the bench.” When he was finished with his meal, his male attendant and nurse would return to his table, help him back into his wheelchair, and wheel him out of the restaurant. “He didn’t seem to mind. . . . He could feed himself pretty well but his meat had to be cut.”9
He had stayed away from the White House when healthy but accepted two dinner invitations after his stroke, on April 9 and May 9. On both occasions, Ben Bradlee, Jack’s former neighbor and friend, and his wife were invited to dinner. “The old man,” Bradlee recalled in Conversations with Kennedy, “is bent all out of shape, his right side paralyzed from head to toe, unable to say anything but meaningless sounds and ‘no, no, no, no,’ over and over again. But the evening was movingly gay, because the old man’s gallantry shows in his eyes and his crooked smile and the steel in his left hand. And because his children involve him in their every thought and action. They talk to him all the time. They ask him ‘Don’t you think so, Dad?’ or ‘Isn’t that right, Dad?’ And before he has a chance to embarrass himself or his guests by not being able to answer, they are off on the next subject.” When Teddy and Bobby sang a little song, in two-part harmony, frighteningly off-key for their father, “everyone applauded, especially old Joe. Only he applauds with his eyes.” The only awkward moment occurred when dinner was announced and Kennedy insisted on walking into the dining room. “Jackie supported her father-in-law on one side, with Ann Gargan slightly to the rear of the other side. She has to stand slightly behind him so that she can kick his right leg forward between steps. He can’t do it himself. When he eats, he drools out of the right side of his mouth, but Jackie was wiping it off quickly, and by the middle of dinner there really is no embarrassment left. Kennedy senior had brought along crabs from Florida for dinner. . . . ‘I must say,’ [President] Kennedy said as he ate his crabs, ‘there is one thing about Dad: When you go with him you go first class.’ There is a gaggle of agreement, and the ambassador, jabbing the air with his left hand, much as his son jabs the air with his right hand to make a point, says ‘No, no, no, no,’ and everyone knows what he means. In the old days it would have been some teasing wisecrack. Tonight it’s a ‘no’ that means ‘yes.’”10
He tried not to snub his oldest, dearest friends, but there were moments when he simply could not face them in his present condition. On May 16, 1963, during their spring visit to New York, he and Rose were invited to have lunch with President Hoover at his suite at the Waldorf. “The day of the luncheon,” Rose recalled in an oral history, “Mr. Kennedy seemed rather upset and didn’t just seem to be able to get ready and go down to the Waldorf. He wept a little and he was really quite upset emotionally, so we finally decided that I would go down and lunch with the former President, and hopefully Mr. Kennedy would follow. . . . Then, happily, my husband joined us [with Ann Gargan and a nurse] in about ten or fifteen minutes and it was wonderful to see the delight in both their faces when they met. . . . Of course, at that time their faculties were diminishing and it was very difficult for both of them, but you could see that they felt great emotion and great joy on that occasion from the fact that they had met once more.”11
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Two years shy of a month after his stroke, at approximately 1:40 in the afternoon on Friday, November 22, 1963, while Kennedy was napping after lunch in Hyannis Port, his youngest son, Edward Kennedy (who had been elected to the Senate the year before), presided over a routine debate on federal aid to public libraries. There was a noticeable shout from the lobby. The press liaison went out to investigate, then came back to the floor and motioned to Senator Kennedy to follow him out of the chamber.
The president had been shot in Dallas. The senator rushed home and phoned the attorney general, who confirmed that their brother was dead. Their mother, in Hyannis Port, had already heard the news; their father, still napping in his bedroom, had not. It was decided that no one would say anything to him until Ted and Eunice arrived.
When Kennedy awoke from his afternoon nap, he wanted to watch television but was told that it was broken. Ted and Eunice arrived and went upstairs to chat with him. They decided to wait until the next morning to tell him that his second son was dead. Kennedy ate an early supper in his bedroom, with his children beside him, then tried again to watch television but was told the set in his room was still broken, as was the one downstairs.
The next morning after breakfast, Ted—with Eunice, Ann Gargan, and the doctor, who had been summoned the night before from Boston—went upstairs to tell Kennedy that Jack was dead. Rose stayed outside. “I couldn’t stand it.”12
“To this day,” Ted Kennedy recalled in his autobiography, “the memory of that conversation brings me to tears.” Kennedy wept with his children. The television was turned on and he watched it intently. “He began to sob again, and for the next several hours—indeed, throughout most of the next two and a half days—he alternated between a yearning for information and a revulsion against it.”13
That afternoon, Kennedy indicated that he wanted to go downstairs. His nurse wrapped a heavy blanket around him and helped him get into his wheelchair. Ted was sitting alone downstairs. Kennedy gestured toward the car outside, then, after he was bundled into the front seat and his wheelchair lifted into the trunk, he signaled—by grunts and saying “no” until he was asked the right question—that he wanted to be driven to the airport. His intention, clearly, was to fly to Washington for his son’s funeral. When he saw that the Caroline, the only plane outfitted for him to fly in, was not there, he gestured to Ann Gargan and Ted that he wanted to leave. They drove on, through the back roads, with Joseph P. Kennedy pointing the way he wanted to go, until they reached the house.14
He did not attend the funeral with the rest of his family. Father Cavanaugh came to stay with him. His daughters except for Rosemary, Ted, and their spouses and children celebrated Thanksgiving at Hyannis Port that year, but this time without Jack and without Bobby, who was con
sumed by a grief that would not go away. When only a few weeks later Kennedy flew south to Palm Beach for the winter, he did so without the Secret Service agents who had played so large a part in his life. He was no longer the father of the president.
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President Lyndon Baines Johnson made a point of visiting Kennedy at Palm Beach during a quick trip to Florida in late February. The following month, he called to congratulate Kennedy on Ted’s appearance on Meet the Press. While Johnson chattered away at how well Ted had done, Kennedy could be heard in the background, mumbling incoherently, sounding more like a wounded animal than a seventy-five-year-old man. The call was painful for both parties, but Johnson soldiered on, talking nonstop until Ann Gargan came back on the phone to thank him.
In July, on Bobby’s suggestion, Lyndon Johnson phoned again. When he asked Bobby whether his phone calls upset Kennedy, Bobby responded that they did, but that they also made “a big difference.” Following Bobby’s advice, Johnson talked to Kennedy about the economy and the stock market. There was no sound on the other end of the phone. Ann Gargan came on the line and apologized to Johnson. Uncle Joe “gets sort of emotional when you call.”15
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In the spring of 1964, there had been an attempt to start up his rehabilitation with a trip to a new facility in Philadelphia, but nothing had come of it. “It was a little encouraging there for a while,” son-in-law Steve Smith told President Johnson, “and then he tired a little bit of it.”16
Ann and Rose and the nurses and attendants and therapists did what they could to make him comfortable. Ted tried to cheer him by taking up the matter of the Frank Morrissey nomination with Lyndon Johnson. On September 24, the president, with Ted in his office, called Kennedy in Hyannis Port to tell him that he was “getting ready to recommend your friend Judge Morrissey for the federal bench and we wanted to tell you about it first.” He then put Ted on the phone.
“Oh Dad. Well it looks you’re the man with all the influence still. . . . President says he’s doing it for you and Jack and Bob and myself. And I think he’s giving it a little extra push because of your interest in it.”17
This time, the nomination went as far as but no further than the Judiciary Committee. After a series of damning revelations about Morrissey’s out-of-state legal education, failed bar examinations, and claims of residence in two states at the same time, Senator Kennedy had no choice but to withdraw it from consideration.
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Against all the odds and the medical prognostications, Joseph P. Kennedy remained alive for nearly nine years after his stroke. With every passing year, he withdrew further, seemed to shrink in presence, to collapse into himself, to spend more time in his room, in his bed. “He was engrossed in TV all the time,” Rose later recalled. “He’d look at television upstairs and downstairs.” The visits to New York or Chicago came to a halt. He was still taken out on the boat—and for an occasional drive—and still flown back and forth between Palm Beach and Hyannis Port. His children still visited and filled him in on the details of their lives, except for their reunions with Rosemary. He received visits from old friends: Morton Downey, Carroll Rosenbloom, Cardinal Cushing, Father Cavanaugh. His grandchildren always brought a smile back to his face.
And then, the unthinkable.
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Rose did not learn of her third son’s death until the morning after. She asked her chauffeur to drive her to Mass, then returned through the throng of reporters and photographers that had encircled the house. Quietly, she went upstairs and, after a few moments alone in her room, went in to tell her husband, by herself, that Bobby too was dead. This time, he watched it all on television, in his room, refusing to allow anyone to turn off the set. Hour after hour after hour, he stared at the screen without blinking, without moving, without a sound. And he wept.
“After Bobby’s death,” Rose recalled years later, “Joe’s condition declined until by the fall of that year he was approaching helplessness, not even able to feed himself the greater part of the time, suffering all the annoyances and discomforts and indignities of hopeless infirmity.” On November 18, 1969, nine years and one week after John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s election as president and four days before the sixth anniversary of his assassination, the end came.18
Joseph P. Kennedy died peacefully in the place he loved more than any other, at Hyannis Port. He was eighty-one years of age and had outlived four of his nine children.
Left: Mrs. Patrick J. Kennedy in a formal posed studio photograph, probably just after her marriage to Patrick Joseph Kennedy in November 1887. The former Mary Augusta Hickey was the daughter of a well-to-do Irish-born contractor from a quite distinguished old East Boston family.
Right: Patrick Joseph Kennedy from the 1890s during his heyday as ward leader and East Boston businessman. P.J. was a rarity among Boston’s Democratic leaders, a quiet man who did not enjoy making speeches, a politician known and respected not only for his ability to manage his ward and get out the vote but also for his integrity.
Spring, 1908: A photograph from the Boston Daily Globe of the starting first baseman on the Boston Interscholastic Nine. Joe Kennedy made his mark at Boston Latin, one of the finest public high schools in the nation as an athlete, not a scholar. He managed the football team in the fall, played basketball in the winter, and was captain of the tennis team and an all-star first baseman.
Kennedy had hoped to get a job with a major Boston bank on graduation from Harvard but had to settle instead for a civil service position as an assistant bank examiner. In January 1914, he resigned his position, and after helping to rescue the East Boston bank his father had founded from a hostile takeover, he was named its president. According to the Boston newspapers, he was at age twenty-five the youngest bank president in the nation.
1918: Fore River shipyard, Kennedy with J. W. Powell (far left), general manager of the shipyard, and Charles M. Schwab (center), chairman of the board of Bethlehem Steel. Though Kennedy knew nothing about shipbuilding, he accepted the position as assistant general manager at Fore River because he had gone as far as he could as president of a tiny East Boston bank and needed a job that would carry with it a draft exemption.
October 1914: The wedding photo of Joseph P. Kennedy and Rose Elizabeth Fitzgerald, the mayor’s daughter, as published in the Boston Daily Globe. The marriage of the children of two of Boston’s leading Irish Catholic politicians was performed by Cardinal William O’Connell in his private chapel.
Beside his 1919 Ford Model T, of which he was quite proud, with two-year-old Jack and four-year-old Joe Jr. In June 1919, Kennedy resigned his position at Fore River to take a job as manager of the brokerage business at the Hayden, Stone office in Boston. His next car would be a Rolls-Royce.
In 1920, the Kennedy family moved into a larger house in a wealthier section of Brookline. He is pictured here, in 1924, with his three girls, from left to right, Eunice, three, Rosemary, six, and Kick, four, probably on their way to church.
Another photograph from1924 taken on the front steps of the Kennedy home in Brookline. Grandfather P. J. Kennedy is pictured here with Joe Jr., looking quite unhappy, and his three sisters, Rosemary, on the step below her brother, Eunice, on the top step, and Kick, only partially visible to the far left. Jack was not in the photograph, probably because he was ill in bed, as he was so much during his childhood.
Beginning in the spring of 1926, Kennedy, now in the moving picture business, made frequent train trips back and forth to Hollywood. The first leg of the journey from Los Angeles took about sixty hours, three nights and two days. Passengers changed trains in Chicago, then spent another day on the train bound for New York City. In this photo, Kennedy is shaking hands with Fred Thomson, the cowboy movie star, whom he had signed to a personal services contract.
When Kennedy met Gloria Swanson, whose career he managed and with whom he would have an affair, she was mar
ried to her third husband, Henri, Marquis de la Falaise de la Coudraye. Swanson and the marquis are photographed here, looking rather somber, on the deck of one of the luxury liners on which they sailed back and forth to Europe.
Gloria Swanson, with Edmund Goulding, who wrote and directed her first talking picture, The Trespasser. Though Kennedy had had little to do with the writing or filming of the picture, he produced it and proudly introduced Gloria at the premieres in London and New York in the late summer and fall of 1929.
September 23, 1932: Kennedy is standing a bit right of center in the first row as the Roosevelt campaign train stops somewhere near the Oregon-California border. On the train platform is Franklin Delano Roosevelt. His son James is to his far right. Kennedy was delighted to be one of the few campaign officials invited to ride on the train with the candidate. And Roosevelt was delighted to have onboard the wealthy Irish Catholic businessman with connections to Hollywood, to Wall Street, and to William Randolph Hearst, the nation’s most influential publisher.
July 19, 1934: Kennedy expected to be rewarded for his service during the campaign with a cabinet position and was infuriated when he was not invited to join the new administration. More than a year and a half after the election, Roosevelt, to the surprise and dismay of almost every member of his inner circle, appointed the ex–Wall Street operator as first chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission. Here Kennedy poses for a press photograph with his fellow commissioners, Ferdinand Pecora and George Mathews on the left and James Landis and Robert Healy on the right. Pecora had served as chief counsel to the Senate Committee on Banking and Currency during its investigation of Wall Street in 1933 and 1934. Landis, a former Harvard Law School professor, had helped draft the 1933 securities legislation. He would serve as Kennedy’s chief adviser on the commission and remain a family friend and adviser for the rest of his life.