The Kennedy Imprisonment

by Garry Wills

  My good-looking father had been playing the Don Giovanni and my grandfather—who had a patriarchal tendency to summon the family together when advice or reproof was called for—did so then. I think he principally wished to assure my mother of his support, but before he could say anything she addressed him, together with the rest of the assembled family. “Thank you very much for your concern for me,” she said, “and I hope what I am going to say will not lessen your affection for me. But one thing I must ask you to understand. I am proud of my husband and will not have anything said against him.” In point of fact I suppose it might be said that my wise mama was the winner in the end. For the last twenty years of her life my father never left her side and he adored her to the end.

  The woman should wait for her wandering husband to come home, and then take care of him in his old age. Meanwhile, she must never complain, never let on that she knows what everyone around her knows. Not only will Joseph Kennedy take Gloria Swanson into his home, Rose Kennedy will talk of that in her own book as an honor done to their abode:

  Gloria Swanson was our house guest for a couple of days in Bronxville and brought along her small daughter, who was about the age of our Pat, who was about ten. They got along well together, and Pat took her down to show her the Bronxville public school and meet her classmates and perhaps show off a little, as she did by introducing her as “Gloria Swanson’s daughter.” Nobody believed her. They all just grinned, thinking it was a joke. After all, Gloria Swanson was, to them, practically a supernatural being, so she wouldn’t be in Bronxville.

  But Rose knew why she was in Bronxville. As she knew why she was on the boat to France.

  When Joseph Kennedy was in Hollywood, during his many long absences, Rose took it as her duty not to disturb his work:

  It may seem unusual, but I did not think it was vital for my husband to be on hand for the birth of the babies … I knew he worked hard for us.… In the same spirit and for the same reason, as the years went on and our children grew and went through the inevitable period of childhood accidents and diseases (though the latter were more frightening then than now), I saw no point in mentioning these to Joe if he was away and telephoned me for the family news. There was little or nothing he could do to help the situation at a distance, so why worry him? How could he do his own work well if his thoughts were preoccupied with concern for a beloved child? I remember once, for instance, when he was in California and telephoned me within a matter of minutes after I arrived home from a car accident that had put a good-sized gash in my forehead. I was feeling shaky. In fact, when the call came I was lying on my bed pulling myself together and drinking coffee. But I spoke naturally, gave him news of the children and told him what a fine day it was: a perfect day for golf. Then I drove to the hospital where the doctor took five stitches in my forehead.

  When Rose was at the Court of St. James’s, Eunice heard of her mother’s appendectomy from the newspapers—she had not wanted to worry the children. When Rose saw her son John at Mass on the morning of his inauguration, she avoided him—she did not want to embarrass the President-Elect with her makeshift snow garb. A woman’s virtue is not to embarrass the men of the family, obstruct their careers, dim their accomplishments. In fact, she must not only excuse her husband’s lack of attention to her, but make her forgiveness so manifest that no one else will have trouble forgiving him. Arthur Krock told the Blairs that Rose’s attitude made it unnecessary for any outsider to feel sorry about Joseph Kennedy’s wanderings: “It was the way of the world as far as I knew it and the way of his world. I was not concerned about what happened to him in that respect. It never bothered me at all because Rose acted as if they didn’t exist, and that was her business, not mine.”

  There can, as singer Gobbi says, be a noble pride in such refusal to complain. Once, when Rose almost broke into tears after the death of her second son, she pulled herself together again and told her companion, “No one will ever feel sorry for me.” But that was something beyond her control. Others did feel sorry. Mary Pitcairn Keating, who visited Hyannis Port while dating John Kennedy, says:

  Of course, she never saw things or acknowledged things she didn’t want to, which was great. I had the feeling that the children just totally ignored her. Daddy was it. I mean, I was the one who went out and picked her up when she was coming down to Washington for dinner. When the children went to Europe, Mr. Kennedy would come down to the boat with a couple of his Catholic legmen, but Mrs. Kennedy never did. At the Cape, Mrs. Kennedy was always by herself. You know that little house she had by the beach? She’d take her robe and her book down there. When she went to play golf, she’d go by herself. She did everything by herself. I never saw her walking with one of the children on the beach.… She was sort of a non-person.

  Rose said she put up her separate little cottage at Hyannis Port to get away from the noise of a large family. It became a cell, not of loneliness but of study and prayer. Rose Kennedy belonged to the last generation of Catholic women who could combine, in some measure, the two vocations held up to them by the nuns—marriage and the convent. Rose traveled, prayed, and read much of her life in a chosen solitude. My own Irish grandmother, who was also called Rose and raised a large family, came to live with my parents after her husband died; and she turned her room, complete with prie-dieu and statues, into a chapel for her spiritual reading and rosaries. This double life was easier for Rose Kennedy, since she had nursemaids to bring up the children till they were old enough for boarding school. As she herself writes, “I did little diaper changing.” Her file card, to keep track of the children’s health records, became famous when she went to England. But that was surely a minimal labor for one with nine children to keep track of. There is no questioning her deep affection for her children, her duties gladly performed. But she was soon shut out of the active philandering life of her sons; and though she traveled some with Eunice, even the girls preferred the company of their father and the games of their brothers.

  “Joe and I had agreed that the responsibility for education of the boys was primarily his, and that of the girls, primarily mine.” Which meant that the boys went to secular schools, which would promote their careers in the world, while the girls were sent to convent schools. There was a division of labor. Boys play, girls pray. But the Kennedy girls wanted to play, too—and did it as strenuously as the boys. Women visitors at Hyannis Port found themselves forced into games where the Kennedy boys and Kennedy girls were equally ferocious. Kate Thorn, wife of a Navy friend of John’s, told the Blairs:

  I remember Eunice was in a sailing race and didn’t have a crew. I’d never been in a boat in my life and I was made her crew. They were in everything to win, not just to participate. I remember how cruel I thought she was because she kept barking orders at me and if I did something wrong she’d scream. But she knew what she was doing and what she had to to win. And we won the race.… And I was pregnant at the time.

  There is a famous story of Joseph Jr. throwing Edward out of his boat, during a race, for clumsy handling of a jib. Mrs. Thorn may not know how close she came to going overboard herself. Mary Pitcairn Keating says, in the Blairs’ interviews: “I was a bridesmaid in Eunice’s wedding. She was highly nervous, highly geared, and worshipped Jack. I always thought she should have been a boy.”

  Another woman who visited the Kennedy home with Mrs. Thom remembers: “We were organized from the moment we arrived. The Kennedys organized everybody. I hated playing tennis, so Eunice invited me to play golf. The next day we played touch football, which was hideous. But we had to play and it was relentless.” Later, Jacqueline Kennedy’s independence was marked by her successful refusal to play “dumb football.” But in her engagement days, as one can see from photographs in the Kennedy Library, even she was dragged into the family softball game.

  What rebellion the girls expressed was not in defense of their mother, but in efforts to join their father’s world, the world of male play and politics. They were expected to work only
in wartime; they could not run for office themselves. Their task was to marry and raise children. But the oldest marriageable sister did not take up the pious role of Rose—she would marry a non-Catholic, an anti-Irish Englishman, part of that world Joseph Kennedy aspired to. It was Kathleen, who thought of womanizing as an English trait, who married the Marquis of Hartington.

  The next sister, Patricia, joined her father’s world in a different way, marrying not only an Englishman but a movie star who ran with Sinatra’s crowd. Eunice, the strongest of the sisters, helped her brothers campaign but married a man who was given part control of the family business; Jean did the same. These sons-in-law did work the father thought of as below his own boys, but still above the girls. The in-laws would help service the careers of Kennedy after Kennedy. They had married all of them. Torbert Macdonald, John’s friend from Harvard football days, fell in love with Kathleen; but he realized he was too independent to become what he called “a corporate son-in-law,” and broke off the attachment.

  The exceptional Kennedy in-laws married the brothers who were murdered. Ethel Skakel had several advantages in her own right. She came from a large and competitive Catholic family, and she was the strong one, the Eunice, of her sisters. But, more important, she married the brother who was not a “chaser,” the one male in whom the mother’s piety took root. If the rule of the father was that boys play while girls pray, pious Robert was to that extent womanish. He did not challenge his father’s rakish habits; but neither did he try to emulate them. He was left out of his brother’s carousings, and felt excluded from the friendships John formed at Choate and in the Navy. John often called his brother a puritan. A visitor to Hyannis Port during the war told the Blairs: “Bobby came home from Harvard. He was a scrawny little guy in a white sailor suit. He was very upset that we were sneaking booze in the kitchen. He was afraid his father might catch us and he knew his father’s wrath. But Kathleen handled him. She told him to get lost.” On another occasion he came in while John was entertaining friends, and was ignored; going up the stairs he asked plaintively, “Aren’t you glad to see me?” He was left out of the fraternity house side of Hyannis Port. Herbert Parmet claims that “Not until after Jack’s death did Bobby Kennedy shed his jealousy over his brother’s closeness to Torby [Torbert Macdonald].”

  Unlike his brothers—Joseph Jr. was unmarried when he died at twenty-nine, and John did not marry until he was thirty-six—Robert settled down early. He was married by the age of twenty-five, and started raising his large family, to which he was devoted. Around children, Robert was almost maternal—not the strict disciplinarian his father had been, the man whose wrath he feared when grown-up children “sneaked” Scotch to Navy friends. The “boiler room girls,” who became famous after Chappaquiddick, said he indulged his children when they came into his Senate office, sat on the laps of secretaries and pretended to type. Esther Newberg recalled, in her oral history for the Kennedy Library:

  Christopher said to Matthew, when he was sitting on my lap eating a mouthful of crackers and the Senator was in his doorway, “Show the lady how you learned to whistle.” And he turned around all over a brand new suit and he showed me how he learned to whistle. Crackers everywhere! It was just a mess! The Senator thought it was amusing. I wanted to slap the kid in the face, but it really was kind of cute.

  But if Robert was “feminine” in his piety and maternal instinct toward those he loved, he was the fiercest Kennedy competitor, the one who played touch football with a grim determination worthy of war, all bony elbows and fierce beaked face. The first time he met James Hoffa, Robert said he thought him “not so tough”—and challenged him to a push-up contest. Robert’s ruthlessness became a family joke—and, like most such jokes, would have lacked point if it lacked a basis in fact. When Robert visited Edward after the plane crash that almost killed the youngest brother, the patient opened his eyes and smiled groggily, “Is it true you’re ruthless?”

  Robert’s piety just made his fighting spirit more awesome—he not only wanted to win but to destroy evil, whether that was embodied in the Communists he helped Joseph McCarthy hunt for a while or in Hoffa’s corrupt teamsters. John did not ask Robert to organize his campaigns out of mere family loyalty. He knew that Robert would be demanding on subordinates, up to and past the point of abrasiveness. Friends of Robert regretted, when he ran for office himself, that he had no “Bobby” of his own to “kick ass” in the lower echelons of aides. It was this harsh and ruthless side of Robert that gave poignancy to his later concern for the poor, and made his brother take seriously his plea for restraint in the Cuban missile crisis.

  Joseph Kennedy might not have recognized himself in the puritan Robert but for the latter’s almost kamikaze physical daring and cult of athletic prowess. He would prove he was a true Kennedy down to his final days—climbing mountains, shooting rapids. If he was a more cautious skier and driver than his brothers, it was because he calculated risks with a more economical insistence on what is needed to win. In remorseless determination to reach his goal, the puritan resembled his predator father more than did any other son (or daughter). And he married a scrapper of his own sort. Ben Bradlee wonders at Ethel’s will to win:

  Another time Kennedy and I were playing at Hyannis Port with Ethel and she was about seven months pregnant. I had not played golf for a couple of years, as I remember, and I had never played that course. The stakes were again ten cents a hole. Once I asked Ethel what club she thought I should use, because I was unfamiliar with the course and unsure of my own judgment. She suggested a five iron, and I clocked it pretty good, only to see it go sailing way over the green. I turned around to the sound of gales of laughter from Ethel and the president. She wanted to win so badly she had purposely suggested too much club.

  Jacqueline Bouvier was tough in a different way. John Kennedy did not marry her until the bachelor state began to pose a threat to his career. Even as late as 1980, Governor Brown of California found that an unmarried presidential candidate is suspected either of homosexuality or of promiscuity—he was damned if he traveled with Linda Ronstadt, and damned if he didn’t. It seems unlikely that John Kennedy would have been accused of homosexuality. But his large and growing number of heterosexual affairs might prove damaging to any effort at the White House. It was during the 1952 race for the Senate that speculation about Kennedy’s marrying came to a head. The Saturday Evening Post ran an article calling him “just about the most eligible bachelor in the United States, and the least justifiable one.” Kennedy obviously took those last five words in several senses; after delaying the announcement long enough to let the article have its impact, he told the world he was marrying Jacqueline Bouvier, twelve years his junior, an ideal political choice. She was a Catholic by upbringing, but with a worldly background as well. She had not gone to convent schools, but to Vassar. Her father, whom she deeply admired, was a famous rake, “Black Jack” Bouvier. Like Kathleen Kennedy, she married a man who resembled her father in his attitude toward women. When Senator Jack met Black Jack, she recalled: “They were very much alike. We three had dinner before we were engaged, and they talked about politics and sports and girls—what all red-blooded men like to talk about.” Like Rose Kennedy, but for very different reasons, she would not criticize her husband’s affairs with other women. It was part of the world she knew, where fame and money and glamour cost something.

  The political calculus of John’s wedding was so obvious that even Professor Burns, in his early biography, wrote: “At least one good friend doubts that Kennedy would be married today if he had lost his Senate battle.” And Burton Hersh calls that remark “as sybilline and penetrating as any ever made concerning the oncoming President.” But if he had struck a good bargain with his marriage, so had she. Her later arrangement with Onassis showed what was transferable from the Kennedy contract—power, money, fame. No other coin was current in both realms. She too, even the ethereal Jacqueline, was more than half in love with Hollywood. And if Onassis was a
womanizer, one might expect better taste in one who chased Maria Callas than in Judith Campbell’s lover—though one hesitates at the report of whale-testicle coverings for the bar stools on Onassis’s yacht. Jacqueline Kennedy did not enter tabloid heaven when it came time to marry Onassis—that had been done earlier; she merely achieved its empyrean.

  Joan Bennett Kennedy was not in the league of these tough ladies. Like Ethel, she was a Manhattanville student, with the Madames of the Sacred Heart, when she met a law student named Kennedy. But her Kennedy was not the monogamous Robert. It was Edward, the nicest of the Kennedy playboys, but playboy still, at least for some crucial years of their marriage. She tried to play touch football like Ethel. As if to prove her worth, the new Kennedy bride told journalists: “Ted taught me to play tennis and golf, to waterski and be a much better skier than I was.”

  But, try as she would, she was on the outmost rim of the concentered Kennedy family. The nucleus was the father. Around him circled the sons, near to the point of disappearing, at times, into this center of family gravity. Outside that tight ring came the women Kennedys, wife and daughers. Outside that, the male in-laws, Sargent Shriver running the Merchandise Mart, Stephen Smith financing campaigns out of the patriarchal stock. Outside that ring, the female in-laws—but even here Joan was not an equal to the other two; she came in a distant third, farthest from the family’s animating center—till she spun out, alone, into darkness.