The Kennedy Imprisonment

by Garry Wills

  “There is a myth that Boston is his home. It is only the place where he went to college. He is a Cambridge man and he looks at Boston as Harvard looks at Boston, in some middle distance between amusement and disgust.” Kennedy’s parents moved from Brookline to New York in 1926, when he was nine years old, and he grew up there, went to school there, before going to prep school in Connecticut. True, he spent summer vacations at Hyannis Port, just as he spent winter vacations in Palm Springs—but that did not make him a resident of Massachusetts or of Florida. When he decided to run for Congress in 1946, he had not lived in Boston for twenty years; he had to take out rooms at the Bellevue Hotel to be his official residence.

  Later, people would remember the cry of “carpetbagger” raised against Robert Kennedy when he ran for the Senate in New York. But the charge had first been leveled at John Kennedy, and with better reason. Robert had been only one year old when his family moved to New York. That state was his home for all his young life. And, just to make the border-crossing story more complex, Edward was actually born in New York, though he would follow John’s example—and claim his old residential apartment—in running for the Senate from Massachusetts.

  The loyal Kenneth O’Donnell admits that “Jack Kennedy himself was a stranger in Boston, having lived as a youth in New York and at Hyannis Port on Cape Cod.” But he suppresses the accusation that hurt most: Kennedy was called the Miami candidate, a Floridian like his father. In 1946, Kennedy senior had to hire local politicians to instruct his son in the state’s ways. David Powers remembered with wonder that “It took Jack three months before he found out that Mather Galvin wasn’t a woman” but a pol known for bounty in dispensing favors. So much for the Edwin O’Connor view of Kennedy as a kind of Ivy Shamrock sprung from Honey Fitz, the Purple Shamrock himself.

  Though Joseph Kennedy was the first in the family to get out of Boston, his father had taken care to make that departure possible. The state legislator’s son was educated at Boston Latin School and Harvard, where he could learn to talk like the brahmins. During the war John Kennedy got mad at a Navy friend’s surprise over his father’s diction—he did not have the “lower class” Boston accent. The son was angry that anyone would expect his father to “talk mick.”

  The grandfather of the future President, Patrick Joseph Kennedy, had a cerain contempt for the Irish weaknesses he ministered to as a bartender. He did not drink himself—asked to celebrate some occasion with a toast, he would fill a shot glass with beer. He was a man anxious to forget his own origins. Elected to the state legislature, he could put “liquor dealer” as his occupation—he did not tend bar anymore. Later, with sensitivities further honed, he would identify himself only as “trader.” His son, in turn, got out of the liquor business just before John Kennedy’s campaign for the House of Representatives.

  Though Joseph Kennedy would later be embarrassed by his florid father-in-law, John (Honey Fitz) Fitzgerald, it should be remembered that Fitzgerald too went to Boston Latin and was enrolled at the Harvard Medical School when his father died and he had to go to work. As soon as he rose in the world, John Fitzgerald affected brahmin ways, playing polo, hobnobbing with Sir Thomas Lipton, fox hunting. Later, when Edward Kennedy thought of riding with a polo team, his father told him Kennedys were not polo society. He was referring to John Fitzgerald’s unsuccessful attempts to become assimilated on horseback.

  But if John Fitzgerald was only semidetached from his own father’s “shanty” background, he sprang his daughter almost entirely free. She was schooled not only at Manhattanville, the “best” school for Catholic ladies, but abroad with German aristocrats. She was a catch for the young bank president, who first suffered the condescension of Honey Fitz, and then spent years repaying it a thousandfold.

  With this beautiful wife at his side, Joseph Kennedy did everything he could to be accepted by the “real” Boston. Not content to vacation with the wealthy Irish at Nantasket, he went to the WASP playground at Cohasset—where the country club blackballed him. Years later he recalled every such rebuff; and, according to Ben Bradlee, so did his son. Even the tranquil and pious Rose Kennedy once asked a Harvard student from one of the brahmin families, “When are the nice people of Boston going to accept us?” As late as 1957, the New York Times could quote her husband’s protest at being called an Irishman: “I was born in America. My children were born here. What the hell do I have to do to be called an American?” After his graduation from Harvard, where he was not accepted into the best clubs, Joseph Kennedy kept trying to ingratiate himself at class reunions, furnishing the beer and entertainment; but when he was booed at the twenty-fifth one, he attended no others. Richard Whalen wrote: “In years to come, for a number of reasons he found sufficient, Kennedy adopted an attitude toward Harvard that friends and classmates sadly described as hatred.” The family sensitivity was passed down. To paraphrase Jacqueline Kennedy, it was unfair for the Kennedys to be treated as Irish, they were such poor Irishmen; they tried so hard to be anything but.

  Convinced at last that he would always be just another Irishman in Boston, Kennedy decided in 1926 to “purge his trousers cuff of the Boston Irish” (in Kempton’s words) by moving to fashionable New York addresses: Riverdale, Westchester, Bronxville. When he did not get the cabinet position he aspired to under Roosevelt (Secretary of the Treasury), the only honorific that appealed to him was Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, the diplomatic post even brahmins look up to. There was no Irish hatred of the English among Kennedys. Just the opposite. Most of the heroes (and some of the in-laws) of the Kennedys were English.

  Though he realized that his son would have to learn the Irish wards in Boston, he carefully put him in hands other than Honey Fitz’s, and he approved when his chosen mentor blew up at the ex-Mayor for entering the campaign headquarters. Joe Kane shouted, “Get that son of a bitch out of here,” and John Kennedy did not defend his grandfather. He was learning, like his father, to use the Irish connection only when necessary.

  If anything, John Kennedy went further than his father in dissociating himself from Irish ways. His famous reluctance to wear hats was put down to vanity—he must not have thought they became him. But doing interviews for their book, the Blairs soon learned that an Irish politician’s hat was his trademark in Boston—just as Al Smith’s had been in New York: “Talk of hats—style, size, and so on—cropped up all through our political interviews.” Edward Gallagher, one of those deputed by John’s father to instruct him in Boston politicking, bought the candidate a hat and tried to make him wear it. John refused. He had not come to join the Irish pols, and certainly not to look like them. He just wanted their votes.

  Six of Joseph Kennedy’s children married—not one to an Irish spouse. They had not been brought up to respect their own. In fact, only four of the six married fellow Catholics. Nor were “vocations” ever a serious prospect for any Kennedy in this large family. The mother’s was not the strongest voice in domestic matters. The parish priest was no figure of importance. There was no hint of jansenist views on sex. In all these ways, the Catholic families of Edwin O’Connor’s stories—or Elizabeth Cullinan’s—have little to do with the secular and rootless environment of the Kennedy family. Joseph Kennedy took his family with him to various parts of America and the world, trying to win acceptance on his own terms in several societies—New York, Florida, Hollywood, London—where he could “make a splash” without fully belonging. Phil Kinsella, speaking for the family O’Connor partly modeled on the Kennedys, could say of the novel’s fictionalized Boston, “This has always been our base.” Joseph Kennedy’s children could not say that. They had a floating base. Their base was the father.

  Joseph Kennedy’s loyal inner circle of business subordinates was all Irish; but they were flunkies. They did the work for which Kennedy felt his sons would be too good—only sons-in-law were expected to perform the chores of his lifelong henchmen, the personal attendants Gloria Swanson called his “Four Horsemen.” In the words
of Richard Whalen: “Throughout his career, it was Kennedy’s standard operating procedure to move from job to job behind a protective cordon of cronies.” Dragonflying from this venture to that, he needed a mobile team of men he could trust entirely, who had no other interest than his own shifting concerns, whose base was his person as fully as the children’s base was paternal.

  The father’s rootlessness is reflected in his business attitude. When President Roosevelt put him in charge of the Securities and Exchange Commission, he was called a traitor to the business community he came from. But he was never part of any “community.” He operated in a series of raids—saw opportunity, struck fast, and moved on. Banking, movies, liquor, land—he was in and out of these ventures, cutting his losses, always moving. He did not stay long enough to get entangled in the stable concerns of business, certainly not in any business responsibility to the circumambient community. He was a predator on other businessmen, not their partner. He looked down on them, just as he did on the Boston Irish. If he was forced to be one of them, he would make sure that his sons were not. He must earn enough from other capitalists to keep his family clean of any further contact. When President Kennedy, in the midst of the steel dispute, said his father “always told me that businessmen are sons-of-bitches,” he was not joking; it was the literal truth. Even for associates of higher standing than businessmen, there was little real respect. Through the years Kennedy cultivated and, when necessary, flattered Arthur Krock. But Krock told the Blairs, “I’ve often reflected since those days that he probably never liked me at all, but found me useful and thought he might be able to make use of me.” All others were to be used; but not the family. That was what the others were being used for.

  Joseph Kennedy scrambled up with a desperate ambition. His constant emphasis on self-improvement was the other side, the escape side, of his self-contempt. If he was not always rising, he would be just a Boston Irishman, just another businessman—a crass mick. As he told Arthur Krock, “For the Kennedys it is the shit house or the castle—nothing in between.” The castle was what he hoped to arrive at; the shit house was where he had been. He had no credentials but his latest achievement—no community to lean back on, no base but the one he forged for himself every day, the clearing he made for his family in a hostile environment. The endless catechizing of his children on the need to win, the competitive edge he sharpened in each of them, reflected his own inner urgencies. If he did not keep winning, there was nothing to support him. The dragonfly, with nothing to light on, would just fall straight down forever.

  Gloria Swanson gives a convincing picture of the threat failure presented to Kennedy. The film Kennedy had tailored for her, Queen Kelly, was unshowable; he stood to lose over a million dollars and—worse—to appear ludicrous, to hear the boos that drove him from the Harvard class reunion echoing all around the nation.

  An hour later he charged into the living room of the bungalow, alone, cursing Von Stroheim and Le Baron and Glazer. Stopping abruptly, he slumped into a deep chair. He turned away from me, struggling to control himself. He held his head in his hands, and little, high-pitched sounds escaped from his rigid body, like those of a wounded animal whimpering in a trap. He finally found his voice. It was quiet, controlled. “I’ve never had a failure in my life,” were his first words. Then he rose, ashen, and went into another searing rage at the people who had let this happen.… Bravo, I wanted to say. If you’re forty years old and you’ve never had a failure, you’ve been deprived. Failure is a part of life, too.

  But failure could not be part of Kennedy’s life. One failure was enough to send him all the way back to the shit house, to prove he was nothing but a shanty mick. Kennedys don’t lose. If they do, they are not Kennedys, as Joseph defined them, with their own code and their own excellence, hovering without props in the air by sheer energy of levitating ambition. If (God forbid) they should fail, they would simply be Honey Fitz’s in-laws.

  When Joseph Kennedy’s own ambitions for the presidency were frustrated, he turned to his surrogates, his sons. They would become a tiny and enclosed aristocracy of talent, with a material base entirely provided by him. They need not scramble, or be predators. They would live on the heights to which he lifted them. It was an astonishing act of will, to create a kind of space platform out of his own career, one from which the children could fly out to their own achievements and come back for refueling. As this one or that one took on a new challenge, the children were informed by the custodian of their patrimony that “You have just made a political donation” to the new flight.

  The wonder is not simply that the whole thing could be held together by the fierce drive of one man’s will, but that, under the blowtorch of that willpower, none of the children rebelled. Of course, the sons would edge away from some of the old man’s prejudices, his anti-Semitism, his attitude toward blacks. But it is nonsense to say they differed from him deeply in politics. He had no ideology but achievement, and that became theirs. I spoke earlier of the way Kennedys have of talking mainly with other Kennedys, of forming a circle that others are only partly let into. That is the circuit forged by the old man’s desires, the communications system of the little society made to hover in air by his sheer energy. That circuitry animates them all, and to drop out of it would be death for them.

  The semi-Irishness of the Kennedys can be gauged by a comparison that was often raised because the Kennedys were Irish. Another large Irish family, cosmopolitan, talented, tight-knit, has been likened to them over the years—sometimes in mirror-image formulae, such as: the Kennedys are the Buckleys of the Left, or the Buckleys are the Kennedys of the Right. Granted, neither side of this comparison seems to have relished the conjunction. When Robert Kennedy refused to go on William Buckley’s TV show Firing Line and a reporter asked why, Buckley ferociously answered: “Why does the meat shun the grinder?”

  Both sides rightly sense the comparison is ill-grounded just because it relies on the Irish Catholic connection. But there are real similarities, precisely in terms of this rejection. They resemble each other negatively, by their strenuous push off from the stereotypes people keep trying to use in order to link them. The suggested first comparison not only misses the point, but reverses it: the two families are similar only to the extent that they have ceased, deliberately, to be Irish in the accepted sense.

  William Frank Buckley (1881–1958) deserves his own Richard Whalen—who would, no doubt, get as little cooperation from the Buckleys as the Kennedys gave to Whalen. The son of a Texas sheriff, young Will Buckley was a frontier scrambler who anticipated some of Lyndon Johnson’s experiences. Born on the Brazos River, he grew up in San Antonio, where an educated Basque priest made him yearn for a more cultured world. He taught school to Mexican Americans, and worked his way through the University of Texas, where he became a campus leader, editor of the school paper. After finishing law school, he became an oil speculator—as natural an entry into the financial world, for a Texan, as was Joseph Kennedy’s apprenticeship to banking in Boston.

  Like the Kennedy patriarch, Buckley was a loner, launching individual raids on targets of opportunity, defying the big oil companies. Kennedy, however, diversified, jumped from one successful enterprise to others of entirely different sorts. Buckley, after hitting oil in Mexico, kept free-lancing on the same lines all his life. Thus the Buckleys ended up land rich and oil poor, with too many options on sites with too little oil. The father’s “big killings” came at longer and longer intervals and almost ceased with his retirement. When James Buckley was dragged, kicking and screaming, to the revelation of his income during the 1980 Senate race in Connecticut, people were surprised at how little it was. But Buckleys had never reached the financial stratosphere Joseph Kennedy moved in.

  For one thing, the Buckley father seemed less driven. Given financial competence, he broadened his interests. He admired good prose, and exacted it from his children with the sort of dedication that made Joseph Kennedy try to plaster a Harvard football lette
r on each of his sons’ chests. Here, at least, Buckley was more successful. Only one Kennedy son—Robert, the least likely—won his H. Every Buckley child, so far as I know, writes well—though no Kennedy, without a ghost, found it easy to commit English prose. The elder Buckley, who once taught Spanish, kept Spanish servants and insisted that his children speak both that language and French. He had them all tutored in music. (Joseph Kennedy liked to play classical records as background to conversations, which made Arthur Schlesinger claim that he had a taste for the stuff—it seems to others to belie that fact. Kennedy did not want to go to concerts, just to have classical muzak to soothe him—and, on one recorded occasion, to irritate others.)

  The Kennedys liked to work and play as a team—on boats, foot-balling over the lawn (more ardent than deft), or in politics. The Buckleys are individualists in practice as well as theory. They take their sports and politics in comparative isolation from each other—John Buckley hunting, Priscilla golfing, James bird-watching, William skiing.

  While less single-mindedly attached to each other, the Buckleys are also less thoroughly detached from their origins—some have even married Irish spouses. Religion gets more than lip service from most Buckley children. Their father not only stuck to one line of business, but was ideologically single-tracked as well. Both patriarchs were America-Firsters who opposed entry into World War II, though their sons were quick to enlist in that struggle. Both were anti-Communists in the Cold War period—indeed, both were friends of Joseph McCarthy. But Joseph Kennedy was flexible in his politics in order to be undeviating in support of his sons’ political ambitions. John Kennedy told Dorothy Schiff, “My father would be for me if I were running as head of the Communist Party.” No Buckley son felt he could make that boast.