The Kennedy Men

by Laurence Leamer

  Jack needed these injections to live. Patients were advised to increase the dose during periods of high stress, not as a medical crutch but as a physiological necessity, since in crises and danger healthy adrenal glands produce more of the essential steroids. Jack thus acquired the capability of manipulating his own health, or at least manipulating his psyche. If he took too high a cortisone dosage, however, he risked worsening such potential side effects of longtime use as muscular weakness, high blood pressure, and “agitation, euphoria, insomnia and, rarely, psychosis.” As it was, many of the illnesses and physical problems Jack had had over the years, from his back pain to his stomach troubles, may have been either caused by or exacerbated by his Addison’s disease.

  Jack had been brought up to believe that a man was a vibrant physical being who had the strength to flick off adversity. A man’s whole sense of himself, and everything he did, felt, and thought, was based on good health. Women were not attracted to whiners or weakness. Neither were men.

  Jack’s great creation, then, was not some piece of legislation but himself, a man of apparently endless vigor and health. He let no one stand close enough to his pain to betray his illusion. He let no one know what he felt when he jabbed the needle into his leg for the umpteenth time. On one occasion, though, Red Fay was standing there when Jack was injecting himself. Red was adept at playing the amiable buffoon, and Jack called him into his presence for moments of diversion.

  “Jack, the way you take that jab, it looks like it doesn’t even hurt,” Red opined as he stood over his friend. Red’s insensitivity was usually one of his charms, but on this occasion Jack plunged the needle into Red’s leg. He yelled in pain. “It feels the same way to me,” Jack told his friend.

  Jack easily could have affected a demeanor of such seriousness that it would have seemed natural for him to give up such silliness as touch football and adolescent roughhousing. But that was a part of him he was not willing to lose.

  When Bobby came down for a visit, they got a gang together and went out in the park for a game of touch. On a sunny weekend afternoon the mall and parks in Georgetown were full of ad hoc games, the players sketching out their imaginary diamond or gridiron in the grassy expanses. The Kennedys had their own peculiar game of touch that gave them what they wanted, endless action, but took up a great deal of space. It was Kennedy football, passed on from brother to brother, and eventually from father to son. “They actually didn’t play the game as you normally play it,” reflected Dick Clasby, a Harvard football star who married Jack and Bobby’s cousin, Mary Jo Gargan. “They could throw the ball all over the field. You could throw it behind the line of scrimmage … and if you caught it you could throw it again.” The offensive team could keep passing the ball forward beyond the line of scrimmage until the player holding the ball was finally touched. Then, on the next play, as likely as not, one of the Kennedys would change the goal line.

  Just down from Jack’s touch football game, a group of younger men played baseball. They thought that they had as much right to the grassy field as the football game, and on occasion a batter hit the ball into the midst of the football game. “You better stop that,” the young men were told.

  The next time a baseball came flying over, one of the football players tossed the ball away. The young men came running over. Bobby squared off against one of the baseball players and they battled each other with bare fists. Other men joined in. Jack stood nearby, afterward rationalizing, “I was too dignified to fight.” Jack might pretend that he was a sturdy quarterback for an afternoon, but it would not have done for the congressman from Massachusetts to be arrested in a melee in the park.

  Even a few years later, when Bobby was married and had children and a responsible position on a congressional committee, he still treated a football game as ritual war. On Sunday mornings, he often joined in the pickup touch football game at the Volta Street playgrounds near his Georgetown home. On one play, he came barreling in at the opposing quarterback from his blind side, decking the man before he had time to release the football.

  “Excuse me. Do you know what game we’re playing?” asked the two-hundred-pound quarterback.

  “What are you talking about?” Bobby sneered. “Can’t you take it?”

  “Yeah, I can take it,” replied Bruce Sundlun, the hefty quarterback. “I just want to make sure you understood what game we were playing.”

  A few plays later, Bobby came tearing in and again knocked Sundlun to the hard turf. This time Sundlun rushed toward Bobby and had to be pulled back. “Now wait a minute!” exclaimed Jim Rowe, a burly Washington lawyer. “Let’s stop this. This is touch football, and let’s just play touch football.”

  “Yeah, and if you do this once more, sonny, you’re gonna get hurt,” Sundlun said, shaking himself off and knowing by the look in Bobby’s eyes that he would be coming again.

  On the next play, Sundlun cocked his arm to pass and waited until his tormentor got within three feet of him, and then threw the ball with all his strength directly into Bobby’s face. Bobby’s head snapped back so forcefully that Sundlun thought he had broken his neck. Bobby lay there for a while, his nose and mouth bloody, and then jumped up to fight the quarterback. “Now wait a minute,” Rowe said, interjecting himself once again between the two men. “He told you if you did that once more, you were gonna get hurt. You did and you got hurt. Now stop this. If you can’t play according to the rules, then get the hell out of this game and go home.”

  Bobby stood there thinking for a moment while wiping the blood off his nose. “Yeah, he did tell me, didn’t he? Okay, let’s go.”

  “Years later when Bobby got to be attorney general, he used to use that story,” recalled Sundlun, who was governor of Rhode Island from 1991 to 1995. “If I was at a function and he was there and it suited his purpose, he’d send somebody over to say, ‘The attorney general wants to see you.’ So I’d go over and he’d throw his arm around me like I was his new best friend. ‘See this guy? He’s the only guy in Washington who’s got guts enough to knock me on my ass. The rest of you are a bunch of wimps.’ Or he’d insult them by some expression. But if it didn’t suit his purpose, hell, he’d walk by like he’d never seen me before in his life. But that was what Bobby was like. I’m sure he was very loyal to his brother. And to his family. But the rest of the world didn’t make much difference.”

  When the family got together at Hyannis Port, Teddy played with his big brothers and their friends. He was eager enough but so slow of foot that Bobby or even Jack could dance around him and run down the expanse of lawn for a touchdown. At Catholic Cranwell, a Jesuit school where he spent eighth grade, husky Teddy challenged a priest in robes to a foot race. The father left Teddy eating his dust. As sluggish as he might appear, Teddy was so strong and vigorous that he seemed the very definition of good health. Jack looked at his youngest brother with awe at the precious gift that Teddy had been given, a gift whose value the kid could not possibly understand as Jack did.

  In the first two summers after the war, Teddy and his friend and overseer Joey Gargan worked on the Kennedy farmland on the Cape, clearing the bridle paths and cutting hay for Joe’s horses. The two boys earned thirty-five dollars a week for their endeavors, and as with everything else, Teddy’s father attempted to turn their sweaty labors into a series of life lessons. Teddy had a subtle memory that tossed out much of what passed as a childhood, but these summers he remembered.

  Teddy had a rapport with his maternal grandfather unlike any of his brothers, and it was on those long summer days that he first became close to Honey Fitz. The old man did not get along with his son-in-law, who had long ago tired of the ebullient Fitzgerald and his oft-told Irish tales. Honey Fitz found in little Teddy a worthy repository for his endless anecdotes. He was a vibrantly healthy octogenarian who fancied that he ingested immense quantities of iron and bromides by lying on the beach covered with seaweed.

  Much of the time, though, Honey Fitz sat on the sunporch telling stories. �
�He was a marvelous storyteller,” Teddy recalled. “I heard my first off-color story from Grandpa. He was laughing so hard that I don’t think he ever did get to the punch line.”

  In the fall of 1946, Teddy transferred to Milton Academy, where he spent all four of his high school years. He went out for football and made the team as the regular end for his junior and senior years. He did not have the speed to lope along the sidelines and stretch out his hands for a pass soaring thirty yards down the field. But he was big and tough, the choice for short five-yard passes, grasping the ball with certain hands and steeling himself for the tacklers who tried immediately to knock him to the ground.

  Teddy was not only a poor student but a sloppy one, with little regard for such educational basics as grammar and spelling. He was a great talker, though, and made his mark on the Milton debate team. When he spoke, his arguments were perfectly organized, the way they were not in his term papers. No one checked his spelling, and he had such rich verbal gifts that his twisted syntax slid by on a burst of eloquence.

  Teddy already had the makings of a politician, with an inordinate interest in getting his smiling picture in the Milton yearbook as many times as possible. Both Jack and Bobby had had a special close friend, but Teddy was like many politicians in that he had many acquaintances and no close friends.

  At Milton, Teddy borrowed one of Commissioner Timilty’s cars so that he could drive into Boston for his dental appointment. Teddy was in a hurry. He was always in a hurry. And the confounded car kept stalling on him. “Finally it stalled for the last time at Mattapan,” Teddy wrote his father. “And so I left it there. Commish still thinks it’s my driving most likely, but it really was the car.”

  Teddy seemed always to be getting in one sort of minor trouble or another, and it was always someone else’s fault. “This morning I served mass with a boy that said he knew how,” Teddy wrote his parents. “The boy kicked the bell over and stood and knelt at the wrong times. After mass we were practically chased out of the church, but even after I told the priest I didn’t even know the fellow, he mumbled … ‘that he would rather have no one serve than me.’ This was a definite blow to my pride.”

  Another quality of Teddy’s was revealed in his letters to his parents. He didn’t try to impress but laid out his life as it was. Unlike many teenagers, including Jack, he didn’t have a need for a private life apart from his parents. He had been shuttled back and forth between so many schools that he could have been a complete emotional outcast, but that had not happened.

  Teddy might not have Jack’s intelligence or Bobby’s intensity. Unlike Joe Jr., he did not boast to his peers of his intention to be president. Ambition was not his secret mistress. He left that to his brothers. But with all the pressures in the Kennedy family, it was no mean accomplishment to have the same dreams as other young men. He found joy in a dance at the celebrated Totem Pole, a large dance hall outside Boston. He took pleasure in buying a boat and paying for it with money he had earned, and delight in sitting around with his friends or family. Of all the siblings, he had the greatest prospect of a life full of what most people call happiness.

  While Teddy struggled through Milton with few thoughts of the burden of the name that he bore, his father was attempting in a subtle, even brilliant way to institutionalize the Kennedy place in American life. During the war, Joe had gotten involved in real estate, becoming a major player in New York City and elsewhere. In 1945, he made what was probably the most successful business deal of his life. Without even one visit, he purchased the gigantic Merchandise Mart in Chicago, then second only to the Pentagon as the biggest building in the world, for $13 million. The building had been built in 1930 for $35 million, an indication in itself that he had struck a good deal. Beyond that, he knew that the government tenants of the four-million-square-foot building would be leaving after the war. Then he would be able to lease space at top commercial rates, generating several million dollars of profit a year.

  Joe had no intention of having his money siphoned off to Washington in the unholy name of taxes. He considered laws, whether they dealt with the stock market, taxes, or political contributions, the instruments on which he played the tune that he wanted to play. And thus in 1946, he turned the Merchandise Mart into a device to help perpetuate his family and their legacy.

  Joe gave one-quarter of the Merchandise Mart to a new family foundation named after his fallen son, the Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Foundation. This money would grow tax-free, and Joe would be able to spread his bounty around to whatever charity, or semi-charity, he saw fit, stamping every gift with the Kennedy imprimatur. He turned the other 75 percent into a partnership that paid lower taxes than a corporation, keeping one-quarter of the company for himself and Rose and putting the rest in trust for his children. In 1946, Joe divested himself of Somerset Importers, his liquor holding.

  Joe set out to follow in the exalted footsteps of the old Boston elite, turning himself into a philanthropist. The original mandate for the Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Foundation was full of a nineteenth-century paternalism with its purpose of “relief, shelter, support, education, protection and maintenance of the indigent, sick or infirm; to prevent pauperism and to promote by all lawful means social and sanitary reforms, habits of thrift, as well as savings and self-dependence among the poorer classes.”

  Joe did not use the foundation merely as a cynical device to foster goodwill for his family. If he had wanted to do only that, he would surely have begun by handing out grants during Jack’s primary campaign. Instead, he waited to announce the first major grant until two months later, in August 1946. Jack was there to hand out a $600,000 check to the Franciscan Sisters of Mary to construct a convalescent home for children of the poor named after Joe Jr.

  Joe heard applause for his largess, but wherever he looked he saw outstretched palms. Some were desperate, heartfelt pleas, others the most cynical of gambits. There was a letter about an impoverished blind and deaf brother and sister. An Alabama woman was desperate for a place to live. A bishop in India wanted money to build a leper asylum. The priest at the Most Holy Redeemer Church in East Boston, the old family parish, asked for an ad in the commemorative program book for the church renovation, no more than forty dollars. Joe was discovering that in his attempt to memorialize his beloved son, he was saying no a dozen times or more for every yes, and to those he turned down, he hardly appeared the great man of endless largess.

  Joe used this engine of beneficence to lift the Kennedys high above Catholic society to a place where saints and angels trod. The Kennedys were the most celebrated Catholic family in America, and Joe and his minions made sure that message was shouted to all within hearing. Whenever the Kennedys gave a gift, there was sure to be a picture of Jack, Bobby, or Ted, or perhaps all three, handing a check to a beaming priest. And every time Joe gave a major gift he insisted that the children’s home or the hospital wing be named after his martyred son. Life is made of mixed motives, and although Joe demanded his full quota of publicity, he gave his money with care and precision, attempting to create not only goodwill but also good.

  In 1956, when the Kennedys’ gifts to Catholic charities in the archdiocese had reached $2,609,000, Archbishop Richard Cushing devoted an entire section of the weekly Pilot to celebrating the family’s exemplary Christian charity in a spread approved by Joe. On one page was a portrait of Joe Jr. in his naval officer’s uniform, with his hands outstretched above a list of all the gifts, the picture similar to one often seen of Christ. “They [the gifts] are made possible by an extraordinary man of God, a great American and his charming wife and children,” the bishop wrote in an article reprinted in the Congressional Record. Cushing did not wish his less generous parishioners to miss the point that Joe was buying his way into God’s good graces. “When each charity, from faithful hearts, carries with it the seal of Christ’s Church, who can begin to estimate its heavenly reward?”

  In most aspects of his life Joe was proudly, passionately cynical, yet he understoo
d that his wealth, at least part of it, could be an engine of social goodness. “I have always thought that people who for some reason or another are not willing to risk giving away money while they are alive lose one of the greatest joys of their whole life,” Joe wrote Cushing in February 1956. “If one has been fortunate enough, with God’s help, to amass a fortune, one comes to a sense of realization that God must have meant him to give so that he could make it possible, in a measure, for his noble workers, like yourself, to carry on His charity.”

  In the spring of 1948, Joe traveled to Europe for only his second trip since leaving the Court of St. James’s. In Paris, he stayed at the Hotel George V, where he talked to Bill Cunningham, a reporter for the Boston Herald. The man talking this day was not the Joseph P. Kennedy that history remembers, a man great only in his cynicism, a malevolent, grasping patriarch who pushed his sons mercilessly onto the stage of history. This was a man who had at least one noble idea, an idea that in some measure had cost one of his sons’ lives and cast his second son, with his broken body, into the fray. It was an idea that Joe continued to profess.

  Joe believed, as he told the reporter, that in America the sons of wealth had a special obligation to serve their country. Even as he said it he knew his words might sound sentimental, or worse yet, that he might seem to be promoting his own brood.

  “But it’s not just my children,” he insisted.

  I think it should apply to all children of parents who can afford it. What we need now is selfless, informed, sincere representation and service at home and abroad…. Please don’t try to make any heroics out of this, but you asked me an honest question and I’ve given you an honest answer. That has been our family plan for our children from the first. If it doesn’t work out with them, it could work out with some others. I’m naturally tremendously proud of John. I think Joe, if the Lord had seen fit to spare him, would have been a fine man, and would have taken his place somewhere. Robert has yet to prove himself, but he’s bright, conscientious, and he seems to be tremendously interested.