The Kennedy Men

by Laurence Leamer

  Joe’s new home, not far from the trolley into Boston, was a small three-story structure that the newlyweds filled with what they considered all the accoutrements of civility. Part of that was the maid and later the nurse who lived in tiny rooms on the third floor, where they shared the same bathroom and were so close to Joe and Rose that the couple always had an audience. Rose had the maid/cook wear a black uniform at dinner and serve her banker husband on fine china.

  Each evening Joe returned home to what was in many respects a miniaturized upper-crust world, or more accurately, Joe and Rose’s imitation of what they thought that world was. There was the same self-conscious civility between the two of them as between their parents, no vulgar Irish excess, no loud arguments within hearing of the maid. They practiced the decorum that never faltered and wore the masks that never fell.

  When Rose was about to give birth, Joe took his wife to a rented summerhouse on the ocean at Hull. To minister to her, he brought a special nurse, a maid, and two doctors, notably Dr. Frederick Good, who became the family’s pediatrician. There, on July 25, 1915, Rose gave birth to their first child, Joseph Patrick Kennedy Jr., a squalling healthy son who weighed in at a formidable ten pounds.

  Joe was proud of this son who bore his name, but he kept a distance from the tedious business of raising the baby, handing him off to nurses or his mother. Joe was acting no differently than most men of his generation, rendering unto women what was theirs. He went out into the world, leaving the home early each morning in his Model-T Ford, arriving home at night when the baby was asleep or resting and Rose was tired from her motherly exertions.

  Joe kept that same distance on May 29, 1917, when Rose gave birth to John Fitzgerald Kennedy upstairs in the bedroom of the Brookline home. Dr. Good arrived to deliver the Kennedys’ second son as he had the first, but this was not quite the event that Joe Jr.’s birth had been. Grandfather Fitzgerald did not stand below on Beals Street trumpeting to all who would hear that this son would one day become president of the United States, as he had done two years before on the beach at Hull when Joe Jr. was born.

  As Joe saw it, there had never quite been a son like his firstborn, a rousing, exuberant child who charged on into life. He loved his second son too, but little Jack seemed a lesser sort in almost everything—smaller, slower, weaker, and greater only in his susceptibility to disease.

  For most of the men of Joe’s generation, World War I was the defining event of their young lives. In the summer of 1915, after the German sinking of the passenger liner Lusitania, 1,200 American men, one-third of them Harvard graduates, had descended upon Plattsburg, New York, at their own expense for four weeks of military training under General Leonard Wood, a Harvard man. The following summer, with government money, about 16,000 men attended twelve camps similar to Plattsburg across America.

  While these men prepared for war, Joe and three of his Harvard friends, Tom Campbell, Bob Fisher, and Bob Potter, gathered together on the Friday evening before the long pre—Fourth of July weekend at Joe’s parents’ waterfront home in Winthrop. As they reminisced, across the Atlantic the Battle of the Somme had begun. Of the 110,000 British troops who moved out of their trenches toward the German lines on an exquisite spring morning, 60,000 would fall, either killed or wounded.

  On Saturday morning the Boston papers were full of details of the immense human slaughter juxtaposed against idealistic paeans to their sacrifices. Joe’s three Harvard friends read the accounts as true men, seeing the bloody field as the plain of honor where a man belonged and celebrating the nobility of these Englishmen and their selfless sacrifice. Joe sat silent.

  Fisher and Potter were the models of the Harvard gentlemen in whose company Joe had sought to be included. The two men had been his mentors in learning the nuances of the Brahmin world, and they were mouthing the rhetoric of the true man’s credo that was so much a part of Harvard life. It was unthinkable for Joe to stand up to his friends. To do so was to stand up to the very world to which he had so long aspired. Joe nonetheless spoke out, deriding what he considered his friends’ mindless idealism. He told them, as Rose remembered, that their “whole attitude was strange and incomprehensible to him.” His friends, as Joe saw it, were not innocent in their mindless jingoism. He told them that “by accepting the idea of the grandeur of the struggle, they themselves were contributing to the momentum of a senseless war, certain to ruin the victors as well as the vanquished.”

  Joe had monumental insight into the dark and senseless part of human nature. He had his father’s cunning sense of the political world and looked directly at all the twisted aspirations, avarice, and endless folly of humankind. He had his mother’s profound sense of social aspiration and her haughtiness toward most of humankind. He was a shrewd and subtle judge of humanity, knowing just who might be useful to him and how and why, and whom he could use before they used him.

  Joe was a man of what he later called “natural cynicism,” which to him was a dysphemism for the highest realism. His natural cynicism was a philosophical stance that he believed he shared with a tiny elite of men who looked down on humankind with bemusement and disdain. As he saw it, most human beings could never reach for long beyond their basest instincts.

  Joe’s fellow Harvard men contributed as much as any group in America to what he considered “the momentum of a senseless war.” By the time war was declared the following April, America had the nucleus of a college-educated officer corps, in which Harvard men were disproportionately represented. If Joe’s friends were naive, they shared their naivete with millions of their compatriots. Joe’s three close friends all honored their ideals by serving in the war.

  In all, 11,319 Harvard men served in World War I, and 371 died in the service of their country. Of Joe’s class alone, the majority of graduates either enlisted or were drafted, and 7 did not return. Some marched off to war because they were patriots; some marched off seeking fame in the cannon’s roar, and some marched off hardly knowing why. Those, like Joe’s three close friends, who set off as idealists returned as men to whom irony was often the highest political emotion. There had been several Harvards when Joe was there, but for many of the men of his generation there were now only two: those who served and those who did not.

  Joe was not one of those who publicly opposed America’s entry into the war, a cause that might have subjected him to public rebuke and hurt his bank’s business. He was a man of natural cynicism after all, and it would have been futile to stand up to the folly of his fellowman. While some of Joe’s classmates had connived to get into battle, joining the French Foreign Legion or the Canadian forces, Joe connived to get out.

  As soon as war was declared and his friends had donned their khakis, twenty-eight-year-old Joe wangled a fifteen-thousand-dollar-a-year position as the assistant manager of the Bethlehem Steel Fore River Shipyard in Quincy, Massachusetts. In peacetime Joe would never have been considered for such a seat, but all across America executives and managers were exchanging their suits for officers’ uniforms. Joe was willing to help build warships to be used by men who might die in a war in which he did not believe.

  When Joe arrived at his new office in October 1917, he knew nothing about administering a shipyard. One of the first things he learned was that the craft union had negotiated a new wage scale with his predecessor to go into effect with the next pay cycle. Instead of honoring the agreement or alerting the union that he wanted to renegotiate, he simply kept the old pay rate.

  The workers, many of them immigrants, including a large number of English and Scottish skilled workers, were not that different from the kind of men who had nightly sat in his father’s home seeking advice and aid. If Joe had observed that scene with any acumen, he would have realized that you could push men like this, and you could push them some more, but if you broke their trust in you, dishonored your word, then they had a boundless fury.

  When the workers got their pay envelopes and saw that they had been deceived, about five thousand of the
m went on strike. That was no trivial action on their part, for the District Exemption Board of Quincy immediately took away their draft exemptions. “The strikers, in refusing to work in the shipyard … become automatically eligible for the trenches,” one district board member said, the intimidation hardly veiled.

  Within days of his arrival Joe had managed to create a crisis of potentially immense magnitude. The ships in the dry docks were crucial to the war effort, and if the strike spread, its costs would soon become incalculable. No one knew this as intimately as did Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt. The aristocratic Roosevelt, a Harvard graduate, class of 1903, had never had workingmen sitting around in the evenings in the living room of his family estate in Hyde Park, New York. Yet Roosevelt had an instinctive awareness of how to deal with these workers. He sent a telegram in which he flattered the men by telling them that there was “probably no one plant in the country whose continuous operation is more important to the success of this country in the war, than that at Fore River.” He spoke to their devotion to country by appealing to their “patriotic duty.” Most important, Roosevelt agreed to honor the new pay scale.

  In all of this Roosevelt demonstrated the incipient awareness of a great politician who understood that the essence of democratic politics is empathy. A leader must first understand what the other person wants. Only then can he act. Joe, for his part, saw life as a brutal Darwinian struggle in which men of will and power imposed themselves on the mediocre, the passive, and the slow-witted.

  The men went back to work, and Joe left his position after scarcely a month. By any measure but his own, Joe was disgraced, shuttled aside into a lesser post at the new Squantum yard, handling all the company stores. For another man, this defeat would have been a painful moment of self-awareness in which he would have taken stock of his own excesses and mistakes. Joe, however, apparently walked away from this defeat incapable of or unwilling to admit to his culpability, having learned little but that even in the business world he operated in a democracy where the weak majority could gain ascendancy over the strong few.

  Joe could not turn to Rose to talk of this failure. Rose was only a woman, and as The Catholic Encyclopedia expressed it, “The female sex is in some respects inferior to the male sex, both as regards body and soul.” Women were seen as incapable of a man’s high seriousness, and for Joe to turn to his wife for counsel would have been both unmanly and unseemly.

  Rose had no inkling of the emotional price her husband was paying. To her, Joe was a heroic figure who worked terribly long hours for the war effort and suffered from an ulcer for his relentless endeavors. He was nervous and high-strung, and Rose worried about his health. Rose did not think that the debacle in the shipyards would have been reason enough for a nervous ulcer; to think such thoughts would have broken the covenant between them. Joe, for his part, could not and would not see that Rose was probably often depressed, a word and an emotion that were simply not allowed. She was married to a prominent and honored Catholic gentleman. She was a formidable woman in Catholic society, president of the Ace of Clubs, a leading Catholic women’s club, with her own social life and prestige. Her children were looked after by nurses and maids. She had a life that most women would have thought close to perfection.

  Despite his new position, Joe’s draft board had the audacity to try to call him up. He pointed out how indispensable he was to the war effort. When the board thought otherwise, Joe’s boss went all the way to Washington to see that his young associate did not have to serve.

  It was a good time to be an ambitious young man in America away from the stench of the trenches. While one million Americans served in the armed forces, the economy was roaring ahead, and a man could make it in a way he never could before. Joe had only a small office, but he was the turnstile through which all the goods had to pass, and he made the most of it. He had a fine salary, bonuses, the right to run the canteen for his own profit, important new contacts, and the knowledge that Bethlehem Steel was a stock that a smart man had better get into.

  To Joe, all the prissy rules and moral guidelines of Harvard did not apply to him and his life. In July 1919, he joined Hayden, Stone and Company as a stockbroker. His employer, Galen Stone, made much of his money, not by the tedious route of collecting customer commissions but by employing insider information to drive a stock up or down. The technique, while then technically legal, preyed on the avarice and ignorance of the average stock buyer, an approach that fit perfectly with Joe’s view of human beings. He became as adept at this game as his employer. “Tommy, it’s so easy to make money in the market we’d better get in before they pass a law against it,” he told one friend, Tom Campbell. On one stock alone, Pond Coal Company, in which Stone was chairman of the board, Joe made close to seven hundred thousand dollars on an investment of only twenty-four thousand dollars. It was a high-stakes game in which Joe had thrice lost everything, he told his friend Oscar Haussermann, but he had come back and was again on top of the game.

  Joe was a competitor in everything, and to some degree his home life was not measuring up. He could not complain that Rose was anything less than the woman he had married: profoundly religious, Catholic-educated, and socially conservative. But she was not growing into the new age, a time when women could snap wisecracks as quickly as men, roll their stockings on the dance floor, smoke cigarettes, and vote.

  Joe might not have wanted such a woman for his wife, but Rose remained a Catholic provincial. She might talk of culture, but he was the one who truly loved classical music and looked forward to their nights at the symphony.

  Joe Jr. was his father’s namesake in every way, a healthy, vibrant four-year-old, but the other children were not quite measuring up. Jack was a scrawny, whining, sickly tyke, and the newest, Rose’s namesake Rose Marie, or Rosemary as she was called, born in September 1918, was painfully slow in every part of her life.

  In January 1920, Joe came home from his new office on Milk Street in downtown Boston and found that his pregnant wife had returned to her father’s home in Dorchester. It was unspeakable and unthinkable that Rose should leave him, an insult to his manhood, to his children, to his family, and a full measure of the silent pain his wife was suffering. Joe was a good provider and a good husband by all the measures that mattered in the world in which he lived. He could not fathom the idea of divorce, which would sever him and Rose forever from the sacraments of the Church, making him such an outcast from Catholic society that his economic future would be compromised. He had no choice, however, but to wait his wife out, and wait he did for three full weeks.

  In the end it was his father-in-law, a man Joe considered in part a mountebank, who told his daughter to return to her husband. In Honey Fitz’s world, appearances were reality. As mayor, he had orchestrated photos of himself as a devoted family man, the public image so different from the reality, in which Honey Fitz honored his love of home by rarely being there. So there would be, if necessary, a similar portrait of Rose and Joe and their family. Honey Fitz would have no divorces or separations to stain his family name, no disgrace brought on by his favorite daughter.

  Rose’s father did not inveigle his son-in-law to share more of his life with his wife, to attempt to understand her despair, or even perhaps not to arrive home with the scent of chorus girls on his lapel. He saw Joe’s role first of all as a provider, and if there was any failure, it was that he had not provided well enough. “If you need more help in the household, then get it,” he told Rose. “If you need a bigger house, ask for it. If you need more private time for yourself, take it. There isn’t anything you can’t do once you set your mind on it. So go now, Rosie, go back where you belong.”

  Joe was relieved that Rose was back, but he was as drawn as ever to women whose laughter rang freely in the night. He had a suggestively intimate style in his letters to young women. “I don’t know how close you will be obliged to stick to your boss tonight,” he wrote Vera Murray, the executive secretary of a theatric
al producer in August 1921. “I know how close you would have to be if I were your boss.”

  A month later Joe wrote Arthur Houghton, a theatrical manager and friend: “I hope you have all the good-looking girls in your company looking forward, with anticipation, to meeting the high Irish of Boston, because I have a gang around me that must be fed on wild meat lately, as they are so bad. As for me, I have too many troubles around to both[er] with such things at the present time. Everything may be better however, when you arrive.”

  Rose returned to Joe having made a silent compact that she would build her life around her God, her children, and the acquisition of material goods. She was hardly back when little Jack came down with scarlet fever, his body covered with red spots. It was a fierce, highly contagious disease whose very mention made mothers shiver and lock their doors. Rose was of little help, for she had just given birth at Beals Street to their second daughter, Kathleen, in February 1920. Like her sister and brother, the baby risked being infected by the disease. For the first time in their marriage Joe was thrust into the center of his children’s lives.

  Joe knew that to save Jack, and perhaps to save all his children, he had to find a hospital bed for his son. The Brookline Hospital had no contagion ward, and his son was not eligible to enter the special children’s ward at Boston Hospital. There were 125 beds in the ward, and more than 600 Boston children sick with scarlet fever. The illness fell equally on the poor and the rich, the children of the North End and the children of Back Bay. There was a terrible triage at work in the choice between those who would enter the hospital, and probably live, and those who would not and might well die or pass on the disease to their siblings.