The Kennedy Men

by Laurence Leamer

  Joe had learned the sweetest lesson of all. Down this road lay not disease and death but pleasure. He could be the good layman at church on Sunday, the good gentleman around Harvard Square during the week, the honorable escort to Rose on special evenings, and still take his trips down into the demimonde of pleasure.

  During Joe’s junior year Harvard hired its first professional baseball coach, Dr. Frank Sexton, a former major league baseball player. “Any men who through indolence or carelessness handicap Dr. Sexton in his initial efforts as coach deserve the strongest condemnation,” the Harvard Crimson editorialized. Harvard was tired of losing, especially to Yale. The college was bringing in a whole new breed of highly paid coaches. Sexton was supposed to win. He could hardly afford to indulge in gentlemanly inclusiveness; he cut the squad in two, spending most of his time with the A Division while relegating Joe and the rest of the flotsam to the B Division.

  In later years Joe attempted to rationalize the failure of his Harvard baseball career by saying that he had thrown out his arm against Navy, sacrificing his physical well-being for his beloved Crimson nine. This was simply not the case. The four times that Joe did get into a game, he did as well as the regular first baseman.

  Joe loved baseball with rare passion, and as painful as it must have been to be so dismissed, he had no choice but to sit on the bench game after game, week after week. Few would remember how rarely he had played, but everyone would know if he quit. Dr. E. H. Nichols, the baseball and football team physician, told the Harvard Crimson: “No year and no season seems to go by that I hear applied to one or more athletes, the term ‘quitter,’ which is quite the most contemptuous and derogatory term that one college boy can apply to another, and which implies a lack of physical courage.”

  As Joe watched his teammates out on the playing field, he was observing not simply a game of baseball but all the tensions between the traditional ideals of fair play and sportsmanship and modern competitiveness. It was the tension between the Brahmin world Joe sought to enter and the means he was willing to use to get there, means that helped destroy the very world he thought so enviable.

  The ideal Harvard man, in the words of Charles Eliot, the just retired president of Harvard, was a gentleman “carrying in his face his character so plainly to be seen there by the most casual observer, that nobody ever makes to him a dishonorable proposal.” He was a man like Eliot, himself, who believed that pitchers on the baseball diamond should not resort to such despicably low cunning as throwing a curveball. On the football field, Eliot thought, backs should take the ball and charge into the toughest part of the line, never taking the cowardly expedient of attempting an end run. In Eliot’s world, there were no end runs, just charges straight up the middle.

  Those of Eliot’s academic generation were appalled by the spectacle of baseball. They despised this game played as much by professional teams as college amateurs, the vulgar masses cheering on the players in raucous discord, the gambling on the games, and the drumbeat of hype in the sooty tabloids. The purists believed that the players should be quiet on the field and stop such sharp practices as chatting up their pitcher or yelling at the batter. As for the spectators, a sportsman should sit quietly, applauding at every example of good play by either team.

  The student fans liked to sit together in the bleachers, cheering their cherished Crimson on with organized shouts and songs, a scene that the Harvard Crimson declared “a rather hysterical and often unfair attempt to compel victory, rather than a recognition of good playing.” These noisy, disreputable students appalled the good academics of Harvard. “Baseball is on trial as a game for gentlemen,” Dean D. R. Briggs stated with all the authority of his high Harvard office behind him. “If it is the duty of patriotic students to make all the noise they can while the visiting pitcher is facing their representatives … if baseball must, as the Yale Alumni Weekly puts it, ‘degenerate into vocal competitions on the part of the players, or into efforts to rattle the opposing pitchers on the part of the grandstands,’ the sooner we have done with the game the better.”

  At the beginning of the season the entire Harvard varsity team had been given Harvard H sweaters. Joe could wear the black sweater with its crimson H as he walked through Harvard Yard. He knew, however, that unless he played in one of the two games against Yale, he would have to return his sweater with its emblem of honor. As the season went by the prospect of winning his letter grew dimmer and dimmer. Sexton’s team was winning, and even when Harvard was far ahead, the new coach rarely substituted, and when he did, he usually would not reach far enough down on his roster to put Joe in the game.

  Sexton was so dismissive of Joe’s abilities that he did not even choose him to travel to New Haven for the first Harvard-Yale game. The Crimson team decimated the Yalies eight to two, led in part by Joe’s friend Bob Potter, who hit a home run and slid home after another hit. Despite Harvard’s insurmountable lead, Coach Sexton did not make a single substitution.

  Three days later the Yalies traveled up to Cambridge for the second game of the series. It was Class Day at Harvard, a sparkling June afternoon and a splendid setting for the twelve thousand spectators who jammed into Harvard Stadium, even perching on the edges of the field and standing up on the roof of the stadium. Joe’s friend and social mentor, Bob Fisher, was one of the two cheerleaders, directing shouts from enthusiastic ranks of alumni and students. When N. P. Hallowell marched in behind the band with his white bearded face held high, carrying his class banner bearing the numerals 1861, he received a thunderous ovation. The honored classes of 1901 and 1908 marched in too and took their seats behind home plate. So did the captains of many previous Crimson baseball teams.

  These alumni were not here in their suits and ties and bowler hats to watch a mere baseball game. These Harvard gentlemen had come to celebrate the Harvard ideal of sportsmanship. They had also come to watch Harvard win, and they were the driving force pushing Harvard to do what it had to do to be competitive, while paradoxically enough staying true to the sentimental myths of their sweetly remembered college years. They could be merciless toward a losing team—indeed, in the Harvard Alumni Bulletin they had called this year’s successful contingent “rather crude material”—while threatening to boycott games if the players did not stop the incessant, vulgar, ungentlemanly chattering on the field.

  Rose had come too, with Mayor Fitzgerald, to watch her beau perform manly feats. For Joe it was an exquisite setting in which to display his athletic heroism in front of these thousands of Bostonians and others, his sweetheart, and her father, an avid baseball fan. He sat there in the dugout, however, as the Harvard nine fulfilled its mandate on this glorious afternoon, taking an early lead. It was unthinkable that he would play even a moment of this contest.

  The game stayed close, and if Coach Sexton had made no substitutions in the first match, he surely was not about to make them now. The score was four to one when Yale came to bat in the ninth inning, and the coach sent the starting team out on the field for the last time. The first batter grounded out, but the next Yalie stroked a single into left field. A pinch hitter attempted to move the batter on, but he hit into an easy out.

  Two outs. One more out. The Yalies were a scrappy bunch who had not been defeated twice by Harvard in eight years. The Harvard fans knew that it might not be over yet. Then, as the fans waited for Charles McLaughlin to pitch to what they hoped would be the final batter, the coach called time and put Joe in at first base. Only then did McLaughlin pitch. The batter hit to the shortstop, who threw the ball to Joe for the final out.

  While the rest of the team converged on the pitcher’s mound, where they enveloped McLaughlin in their hugs, Joe walked silently off the field, clutching the winning ball. McLaughlin finally separated himself from his teammates and ran over to Joe to claim the coveted ball that was doubly his due, as the winning pitcher and as captain. Joe stuffed the ball into his own back pocket and walked on.

  Joe had thought that the baseball diamond w
as a sacred field of play, removed from all the sordid duplicities of the outside world. He had attempted to live in that world, but the coach had dismissed him from the A squad like a day laborer. The winds of a new age were blowing through Harvard Stadium, even if most of the alumni could not feel them.

  The plaudits won on this field could be cashed in out there in the world, and those who did not know that were fools. Sexton was paid far more than any professor. He was paid to win, and win he had. McLaughlin, the hero of the team, was about to cash in too, by using the fame and honor that he had won on the field to help him get into the new movie business. A few days before this final game, Joe’s father’s friends had gone to the senior captain and told him that if he wanted those movie theater licenses in Boston, then Joe better get into that final game against Yale. And so Joe had won his letter, and he had not cared how.

  To a previous generation, Joe’s Harvard H would have been a badge of shame, not of honor, but he did not see it that way in the world in which he was living. Rose did not see it that way either, wearing the rose-colored glasses that were part of a woman’s natural wardrobe. “My father and I saw him the day he won his ‘H,’ “she recalled, “when he made the winning play against Yale.”

  Joe had his letter, and now he left the team for good. His excuse was that he had agreed to coach the freshman team, but Sexton probably had had quite enough of Joseph P. Kennedy. Although the first-string first baseman was graduating, the Harvard Crimson did not even mention Joe as a prospect to take over the position.

  That fall, Joe was one of only 36 Harvard men among the 2,262 undergraduates who had the right and honor to wear the Crimson sweater with the black letter. He was chosen now for one of the lesser of the final clubs, Delta Kappa Epsilon, in part probably because of his Harvard H. He had achieved his great goal, but he had achieved it so late that he had little time to savor the pleasures of life as a clubman. He entered Delta Kappa Epsilon by the front door now with the men of the Gold Coast. He had achieved what was socially impossible for the Catholic son of an Irish-American politician, and by rights he should have savored his triumph. Yet he was angry that he had been snubbed and had not received all that was his due. He had no interest in sitting around in his club endlessly socializing. He had had whatever he thought he could wring out of his Harvard experience, and he petitioned to graduate at midyear. The university turned him down, presumably because of his academic record; during his four years at Harvard he received not a single A, four Bs, nineteen Cs, and ten Ds, including one in social ethics.

  As he strolled through Harvard Yard, a stalwart senior and the very model of a Harvard man, who knew or cared how Joe Kennedy had won his letter or how he had made his final club? He had entered Harvard hoping to be like the men of the old Harvard world. He was leaving a man of the raw new century.

  3

  Manly Pursuits

  Joe stood next to Rose in Cardinal O’Connell’s private chapel repeating his marital vows. This tender ceremony was a victory not only of love and devotion but also of power and cunning. Joe had wrested Rose from her father, Honey Fitz, in a struggle that had lasted most of a decade and was not yet over even on this radiant October day in 1914.

  For Honey Fitz, as for Joe, life was a matter of battles between men. Joe could see through Honey Fitz as if he were a pane of glass. There was a hard nub of petty jealousy in the former mayor that exhibited itself to any man who might stand above him, even in the private kingdom of his own home. Joe was not a man to bow in deference to his new father-in-law; Joe was a threatening figure to Honey Fitz, especially since the mayor had left office and no longer wore the mantle of power. Joe, for his part, had an acute understanding of Honey Fitz’s vulnerabilities and took pleasure in probing them.

  With neither a fortune nor a great name to bestow on Rose, Joe had set out upon graduation to establish himself in the business world. He first took a job as an assistant bank examiner for the state. It was not a grand position, but it was an enviable one in which to learn how banking truly worked and just how close to the brink of illegality a bank could go without falling off the edge. “If you’re going to get money, you have to find where it is,” Joe told his cousin Joe Kane.

  Joe had been at his new position only a little more than a year when his father came to him and said that a major Boston bank, the First Ward National, was trying to take over Columbia Trust, the bank P. J. had co-founded. The keys to holding on to the bank were the shares held by the estate of the late John H. Sullivan, another founder of the bank. With the barest hint from Joe, Uncle James and Aunt Catherine Hickey came up with the money that, when added to that of his father and several others, saved the bank from a takeover.

  In partial repayment for Joe’s acuteness, the twenty-five-year-old was named president of Columbia Trust, supposedly becoming the youngest bank president in America. He was now a man of such position and promise that he could rightfully claim Rose Fitzgerald’s hand. For Rose, it was an exquisite dream finally realized. “I had read all these books about [how] your heart should rule your head,” she remembered decades later. “I was very romantic and there were no two ways about it.”

  As the newlyweds walked out of the chapel into the bountiful sun of an Indian summer day, they waited on the steps while photographers took pictures. The reporters and photographers were not there for Joe. They would feature the couple on the front page of the next day’s Boston newspapers only because Joe Kennedy was marrying the former mayor’s daughter, the most eligible Catholic woman in Boston. Even in this moment Honey Fitz took his own pound of publicity, standing there with Rose while Joe huddled in the background.

  The wedding party drove over to the Fitzgerald mansion in Dorchester for a wedding breakfast for seventy-five guests. When Rose had made her debut, her father postponed the city council meeting so that his colleagues might attend, and he also invited the governor-elect and other high officials, as well as hundreds of celebrants young and old. For his daughter’s wedding to Joe, he was putting on only the minimally acceptable celebration, a reception at his home primarily for family members.

  It was just as well that so few outsiders were present, for in the midst of the party Joe and Honey Fitz began yelling at one another. Rose was so distraught that she took off her wedding ring and put it on the mantel. By the time the couple left for their honeymoon at the Greenbriar Hotel in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, however, her ring was back on her hand, and her smile was back on her face, and they departed as if it had been a perfect day.

  When the newlyweds returned from their two-week-long honeymoon, Rose was probably pregnant. As flattering as that was to Joe’s sense of manhood, it also meant that if he followed accepted practice he could have no further sexual relationships with his bride until after the birth of their child. If sex outside of marriage was unthinkable and unspeakable, sex inside of marriage had to be carefully rationed. Some experts believed that there was an unfortunate tendency among frisky young married couples to indulge in sex gluttonously every night. Before long, warned Winfield Scott Hall, the leading sexual hygienist, the poor wife “is in a condition of neurasthenia, or nervous prostration, and the husband is consciously depleted in his powers, and his business efficiency noticeably decreased.” Those who indulged too frequently, or in what was considered an unnatural manner, suffered, as Dr. A. T. Reinhold warned, “the most desperate cases of paralysis and epilepsy.”

  Some experts believed that ideally sex should take place once a month, or among the passionate few, even twice a month. The reason for having sex only once a month had nothing to do with religious mandates that sex was for procreation, not pleasure, but with medical and psychological factors. Although the wife’s condition was duly and necessarily noted, the primary concern was the man. In this mechanistic concept of manhood, sperm was the precious elixir of life that, when unnecessarily spilled, dissipated the man, who thus abused himself and the future of his race.

  Joe was a man of immense vit
ality who sought in his marriage to have an active sex life. Instead, almost from their wedding day, sex was a matter of tension between the couple. Rose was pregnant so often during the first decade of their marriage that if the couple followed the conservative regimen, he would have had sex with her hardly more than half a dozen times a year.

  Joe, like his wife, was a man of profound discretion when discussing personal family matters, but Rose’s sexual reticence was so upsetting to him that he talked about it among friends. “Now listen, Rosie, this idea of yours that there is no romance outside of procreation is simply wrong,” he lectured Rose in front of their neighbors, the Greenes. “It was not part of our contract at the altar, the priest never said that, and the books don’t argue that. And if you don’t open your mind in this, I’m going to tell the priest on you.”

  Joe moved his bride to a new house in the suburb of Brookline. The town, one of the wealthiest communities in America, was home to many of the most affluent members of the Protestant elite, their mansions set in cul-de-sacs or shrouded in trees, far back from the vulgar streets. Joe had come out to Brookline in search not so much of fresh suburban air but of a good address signaling that he was an American success pure and simple, no rude immigrant, no hyphenated Irish-American. His neighbors on Beals Street were not old Yankees but for the most part people like himself whose forebears had arrived more recently in steerage.

  Joe and Rose were at the beginning of a migration of middle-class Irish-Americans and largely German Jews to Brookline. He had headed out to the western suburb to get away from the taint of his immigrant past, but Brookline was a veritable colony of the Irish: at 11 percent, they made up the largest foreign-born element by far. For the most part these were not bankers and businessmen, though, but cooks, maids, firemen, cops, plumbers, and sanitation workers, a caste of workers and servants.