The Kennedy Men

by Laurence Leamer

  Power and influence could mean life and death, and Joe saw that he had not enough of either to save his son. His father-in-law, though, still had the power to see to it that little Jack got a bed that should have gone to a child living in Boston.

  Joe was a man who thought he could solve any problem, but he felt now a parent’s helplessness in the face of illness. Watching little Jack in his sterile white room at Boston Hospital touched Joe in places in the heart that he had not known he had. Jack was a likable lad, with his good humor and gentle warmth, and a son who did not cry at having been taken out of his home and placed among strangers. Joe went to church and prayed to God promising that if his son lived he would give half his wealth to the church. And when Jack lived, his father wrote out a check for $3,700 to the Guild of St. Apollonia. It was a noble gesture, but given Joe’s earnings, it would seem that he was a calculating negotiator even when he was dealing with God.

  Joe believed in the saving grace of money, but he now had two more reasons to seek great wealth and power. His wife had returned to him after having been told that her marital salvation lay in more servants and a bigger house. And his son had lived only because of his father-in-law’s power.

  Joe was already making hundreds of thousands of dollars, but now, with the enactment of Prohibition in January 1920, he saw an opportunity to make even more. His own father had made his way in life largely through the liquor business—first with his own tavern, later with a wholesale liquor business—and the political clout of the industry. An Irishman’s pub was his Somerset Club, and for every worker who tumbled out drunk, ten others had a drink or two and went home to their families.

  When the good ladies of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union campaigned for the Eighteenth Amendment to enact Prohibition, men like Joe’s father saw it as a malicious attack on them and their ways. With Prohibition, it was the Italian winemakers of northern California who saw their vineyards turn to weed, the German beermakers of St. Louis whose breweries were shut down, and the Irish tavern keepers whose doors were shut forever.

  An observer might even have viewed the Volstead Act instituting Prohibition as a regressive piece of legislation, targeted at the poor and the foreign. Since the law allowed citizens to stock up beforehand, the forward-looking men of New York’s Yale Club put away enough for nearly a decade and a half of good drinking. For the well-to-do, there was always a supply at their clubs and homes. But the saloons of the poor were shut and dry.

  The promise of bootlegging beckoned to the quick and the daring, but not to Harvard men. Crime was often a poor man’s capital, the quickest and surest way out of the ghetto. Joe, however lived far from the cusp of poverty and was within reach of the refined upper-class world where he sought to live. But Joe saw an opportunity. That he saw it and acted upon it is one of the most extraordinary facts of Joe’s entire life. His father had for decades been a major wholesaler and importer of liquor, and it was probably through him that Joe had contacts in Canada and England. Testimony suggests that Joe had the best of it, for the most part delivering the merchandise offshore to bootleggers who brought the liquor into the United States. In 1926 the Canadian Customs Commission looked into liquor export taxes that were not being paid and found the name “Joseph Kennedy” on many documents. Although the commission never definitively linked the name to the young Boston businessman, there is no other Joseph Kennedy whose name has been prominently linked to bootlegging.

  Joe did not enter this illegal business as some desperate expedient. He took no more risks than he did with some of his early gambles on Wall Street. If anything, liquor was another part of his portfolio; he was a businessman spreading his risks. Joe kept such distance from the business that his name was never formally linked to bootlegging. Cartha DeLoach, the former deputy director of the FBI, recalls that “there was a great deal of suspicion concerning his being possibly involved in smuggling in the early days. But as it is in America, you overcome these things.”

  Joe chose his partners as cannily as he chose his part of the business, one of them being Thomas McGinty, an Irish-American known as “the King of Ohio Bootleggers.” “Joe brought the liquor to the middle of Lake Erie, and the boys picked it up,” recalled McGinty’s daughter, Patty McGinty Gallagher.

  McGinty had been a flyweight boxing champion, and he was a man armed with Irish blarney as well as a steel fist. He went on to become the leading Irish presence in the Jewish-run Cleveland syndicate. He founded the famous Mounds Club outside Cleveland, ran racetracks, managed the casino at the Hotel Nacional in Havana, and became a hidden owner of the mob-controlled Desert Inn in Las Vegas, all the time maintaining a relationship with the Kennedy family. His daughter Patty, in the bar in her home in Palm Beach, Florida, has a picture of her father and a smiling Jack Kennedy taken in Havana in the 1950s.

  Another witness is Benedict Fitzgerald, an attorney who not only knew the Kennedys intimately but also represented Owen Madden, a gangster who controlled leading nightclubs in New York City. Fitzgerald says that Joe was involved in bootlegging deals with Madden, a view confirmed by Q. Byrum Hurst, another of Madden’s attorneys.

  Madden, though English-born, was of Irish blood, a son of Erin brought up in Hell’s Kitchen, the Manhattan slum that bred little but disease, despair, and crime. Madden spent a term in Sing Sing, the upstate New York prison, for a killing he vowed he did not commit. Madden was a dapper dresser whose manner may have been appropriated by his friend George Raft in his screen portrayals of gangsters.

  Madden’s pathway was greased with ample payoffs to cops and Tammany Hall that allowed him to be one of the three biggest importers of bootleg booze along the East Coast. He moved from criminal deals to entertainment, backing his lover Mae West in her Broadway debut and running the celebrated Cotton Club, the Harlem boîte. He moved into the world of sports, managing the career of Primo Camera, the giant heavy-weight boxer. In Madden’s world there was a seamless journey from crime to politics to sports to entertainment, and Joe was now embarking on that journey. It was a world in which politicians acted like criminals, and criminals such as Madden acted like politicians or sports heroes. In this world a man like Joe Kennedy was just another player.

  Madden was forced out of New York and took up residence in Hot Springs, Arkansas, where he reputedly controlled much of the gambling and vice. Even then, Fitzgerald says, Joe maintained a business relationship with Madden. “I know that Joe gave him some finances while he was down there,” Fitzgerald recalls.

  According to former Florida Senator George Smathers, “everybody knew” that Joe sold liquor. “But he wasn’t a bootlegger in the sense that he ran across state lines and carried illegal whiskey.”

  Yet another credible witness to Joe’s activities is Zel Davis, a former Florida state’s attorney, whose uncle was the leading bootlegger in Palm Beach County. “Joe was having scotch sent into the Bahamas from England,” Davis says. “He was doing business with Roland Simonette, who became the first premier of the Bahamas in the late sixties. When Simonette was young, he owned shipyards and had boats. He ran one boat from Nassau to New York and New England. Joe also had connections with Palm Beach County bootleggers. That boat came from West End in Nassau to Palm Beach. They built warehouses to hold it.”

  The most intriguing tale of all about Joe’s alleged illegal involvements was given in 1994 by ninety-three-year-old John Kohlert in a videotaped oral history interview conducted shortly before he died. As a young man in the twenties, Kohlert worked his way through college tuning pianos, including those in speakeasies and at the Cicero, Illinois, home of Al Capone. Kohlert, a Czech immigrant, knew little about Capone’s reputation as a vicious mobster and was delighted that Capone offered him work. “When I worked on his player piano, he said, ‘How would you like to stay for spaghetti?’ I tell you, I never had a spaghetti supper such as I had at Al Capone’s place. And he said, ‘Well, we’re going to have company.’ I said, ‘That’s fine.’ The company he had was Joe Kenned
y. He introduced me to him. He said, ‘This is Joe Kennedy from Boston, and we have a little business deal to make at supper. I hope you don’t mind.’ I said, ‘Hell, no, I don’t mind.’ So while we had spaghetti, they made a deal.

  “Al Capone owned a distillery in Canada. I’m not sure, but anyway, it was quite a prominent distillery, that made whiskey. And so they made a big deal of Capone selling whiskey and Kennedy selling Irish whiskey to Capone. And they made a deal to exchange it on Lake Michigan off Mackinac Island. That’s where the Kennedy ships and the Capone ships were going to make the exchange of the two whiskeys that they agreed to there at that spaghetti dinner.”

  An obscure dying man in a short aside in a lengthy oral history has little cause to invent such an extraordinary tale, and little time to create such details. Patty McGinty Gallagher and Zel Davis have no reason to invent a family history so profoundly different from their own lives. Benedict Fitzgerald has no reason to exaggerate his extravagant life. There remains a maddeningly anecdotal character to this evidence and the allegations that have been made in other books, but the sheer magnitude of the recollections is more important than the veracity of the individual stories.

  Joe’s grandson Christopher Kennedy suggests that it would have been impossible for his grandfather to have had such far-flung dealings, doubly so without leaving any record. “About ten years ago a Wharton MBA with a degree in accounting who had audited several of the East Coast’s wealthiest families conducted an audit of Joe Kennedy,” Christopher Kennedy says. “He transcribed to the dollar every source of income and use of cash, and every dollar is accounted for.”

  That result strongly suggests, however, that Joe understood one of the fundamental rules of illegal dealing. The dealer does not get caught holding the goods. Joe occupied the enviable end of the business, away from the police and the riffraff, away from the parceling up and the danger. It is probably testimony to the sheer acumen of Joe Kennedy that no one has come up with any hard physical evidence linking him to bootlegging, but the circumstantial evidence strongly suggests that Joe was a financier and supplier of illegal liquor.

  Joe agreed to supply the liquor for his tenth Harvard reunion in June 1922. During his college days he would no more have been associated with an illegal activity than he would have danced an Irish jig in Harvard Yard. Joe had wanted desperately to be associated with these Harvard gentlemen, but he now no longer thought that it was enough merely to pattern his life on theirs. He understood their quiet disdain for men like him, and yet he was willing to provide their whiskey, fulfilling every stereotype of the Irishman.

  Joe was no retail bootlegger with his stash of liquor, no matter what some of his classmates might have thought. He got his liquor through his father’s associate, charging his class $302 for twenty-six and a half gallons of liquor that he did not drink. Some of these Harvard graduates had ancestors who had arrived on the Mayflower, and Joe had the liquor delivered in a boat that landed in Plymouth where the Pilgrims had disembarked.

  Joe caroused with his Harvard mates, dressed in a sparkling white shirt, a bow tie, and the inevitable crimson sweater. For Joe, this was a uniform for a summer’s weekend. For his old friends Bob Fisher and Tom Campbell, this was practically their daily wardrobe. Fisher had given up his career in merchandising to become the Harvard football coach. Campbell had joined his old football teammate as Harvard’s freshman coach and also served as assistant graduate treasurer of the Harvard Athletic Association.

  Only his other old friend, Bob Potter, had the kind of life that Joe could fully admire. He was vice president of the National Shawmut Bank, lived in a townhouse in Back Bay, and lunched at the Somerset Club, within whose portals Joe was not welcome. Some of these fellow graduates were cutting a fancy picture, but they were coming to old Joe now to hit him up for loans at Columbia Trust. Even Potter, two years later, asked to borrow thirty-five hundred dollars. “It’s all right to give it to him if you can get collateral accepted in the savings department.” Joe wrote the bank officer with a dismissive tone. “Otherwise, just tell him that you have not got the money.”

  Joe, for his part, had long since duly noted the hypocrisy of the Brahmin class. Were the good gentlemen who drank bootleg whiskey cut of a finer moral cloth than Joe, who sold it to them? With all their fine talk of law and honor, these Harvard men drank the liquor brought to them by a new class of criminals. He could stand and talk with these self-satisfied burghers, listening to their tales of business, banking, children, golf, and tennis. He was an amusing raconteur, enjoying the casual camaraderie. He appeared no different from his classmates, though he traveled on a stage wider than any that they traversed and dealt with men like Tommy McGinty and Owen Madden as well as with cardinals and magnates. He was making his way into the shadowy centers of power in America, places his Harvard friends and professors did not know and would never understand.

  4

  “Two Young ‘Micks’ Who Need Discipline”

  Gee, you’re a great mother to go away and leave your children alone.” Jack may have been frail in body, but there was a daring quality to a five-year-old boy who would so confront his mother. It was April 1923, and Jack was upset that Rose was going off to California with her sister for an extended trip of four or five weeks, leaving him and his three siblings behind. It was a risky business to speak out, for if he displeased his mother, she might bring out her infamous wooden coat hanger. To Rose, a coat hanger was not a biblical “rod of correction” with which she beat goodness and wisdom into her offspring. Hers was a more scientific endeavor. The coat hanger was her little tuning fork that she judiciously applied until her children were singing the song she wanted them to sing. She never lost control, never struck them out of sheer anger, but hit them with what she considered the proper, healthy dosage of pain.

  This time Rose did not bring out the coat hanger but she did note her son’s sarcastic outburst in her diary. The next day, as the children were playing on the porch, she said good-bye and drove down the elm-lined street. Realizing that she had forgotten something, she turned back and was relieved to see that little Jack and his siblings were playing, mindless of the fact that their mother had gone.

  Rose may have set off on her trip in guiltless bliss, but Jack had struck at an unpalatable truth. As a youth, he would tell his closest friend, that he had cried every time his mother left on one of her endless trips, until he realized that his tears not only did no good but irritated Rose and caused her to pull away emotionally even more from her second son. He realized that he had “better take it in stride.” The terrible threat was that if he did not buck up, Rose would return physically to the home in Brookline, but she might not return emotionally. As an adult, Jack reflected that his father was “a more distant figure” than his mother. Rose, however, although more often physically present, was “still a little removed which I think is the only way to survive when you have nine children.”

  Jack rationalized the psychological distance that Rose kept from him and his brothers and sisters. It was in part the same distance that Rose’s mother and Joe’s mother had kept from their children, a distance common in Irish-American homes. Love was a sweet cake given out only on special occasions, and then only in modest nibbles.

  Rose took her children to see Bunker Hill and Plymouth Rock. She did not allow Jack and Joe Jr. to romp over the sites but insisted that they stand there while she inundated them with details and anecdotes worthy of a tour guide. Upon returning to the house in Brookline, she quizzed them over lunch, pushing them to remember and recite. When she took her children to Boston’s Franklin Park Zoo, the boys and their sisters did not simply stand and watch the lions prowling back and forth. Rose stepped forward and lectured her children on the Christian martyrs who had been eaten by lions such as these.

  Most women of Rose’s generation might have attempted to follow the child-care experts, but the burden of raising children was such that they often had no time to follow this “scientific” imper
ative. Rose, however, knew that her one legacy would be her children. She was a literalist who took the ideas of the modern scientific experts and applied them as if they were absolute dictums.

  Regularity was the key to scientific child-rearing, and Rose treated it as a moral imperative that played into all of her natural instincts for order and discipline. The authoritative guidebook, The Care and Feeding of Children by Dr. L. Emmett Holt, instructed mothers that babies had to be fed and put to sleep “at exactly the same time every day and evening.” They were to be fed for no longer than twenty minutes, and if they started falling asleep, they were to be kept alert by “gentle shaking” until they finished feeding.

  Dr. Holt warned against displaying too much affection, hugging a crying child, or indulging in mere emotion. The expert considered plumpness the mark not of a healthy bonny baby but of a lethargic, indulged child who, he believed, might be eating “twice as much food as is proper.” Rose had a mandate to take her own obsession with weight and apply it to her children so they would not have a peasantlike girth. She apportioned food to them like medicine, holding off on helpings to Joe Jr. and Rosemary and adding food to Jack’s plate.

  Rose monitored everything that might touch her children’s lives in the home like a guard patting down visitors for contraband. She could not have her children polluted by improper reading material, and she purchased approved books for them at the Women’s Exchange. She was appalled when her mother bought a popular book, Billy Whiskers, and gave it to Jack. “I wouldn’t have allowed it in the house except that my mother had given it to him,” Rose recalled. Rose found the brash colors of the book offensive. It was not the pictures that made the series Jack’s favorite but brash, bold Billy himself. Billy would not be tethered or harnessed. He ate whatever he wanted to eat, from popcorn to cakes, and butted anyone who got in his way. For Jack, it was surely an exquisite dream of a book about a goat that lived free, as a boy could not.