John Kennedy

by Burns, James MacGregor;

  But many a Yankee banker still could not wholly accept Joe Kennedy. It was all right for Irishmen to run little East Boston banks and handle immigrants’ remittances, they felt, but not to crash the central citadels of finance. So Kennedy, disgusted, began to operate more and more in New York and Hollywood. During the mid-1920’s, he moved in on the booming, turbulent movie industry, won control of several motion-picture companies, reshuffled them, and sold out at a huge profit. Independently, he produced two features starring Gloria Swanson, who had become a close family friend, but one was so vivid, involving a seduction scene of a convent girl, that he refused to exhibit it.

  By this time Kennedy was a business legend and a man of mystery. Long after he quit the movies in the late ’20’s, people were arguing about whether he had left behind him a string of strengthened companies or heaps of wreckage. When he deserted Hollywood and began to speculate in the bull market, his operations became even more obscure. “He moved in the intense, secretive circles of operators in the wildest stock market in history,” Fortune later commented, “with routine plots and pools, inside information and wild guesses.” But Kennedy came out of the bull market with many millions, made more in the crash, and even more by shrewd speculation in liquor importing, real estate, and numerous other enterprises joined together in a financial labyrinth that probably only the financier himself understood. “The legend of Joe Kennedy,” said Fortune in its painstaking and admiring profile, “made him at once the hero of a Frank Merriwell captain-of-the-nine adventure, a Horatio Alger success story, an E. Phillips Oppenheim tale of intrigue, and a John Dos Passos disillusioning report on the search for the big money. The truth makes him the central character of a picaresque novel of a sort not yet written.”

  Kennedy had been raised in a heavily political atmosphere; he says today that one of his first memories was of two men coming to his father and reporting in a matter-of-fact way, “Pat, we voted 128 times today.” But Boston politics, with its petty intrigues and backbiting, bored him. Having made his millions, he moved up through politics, as Pat and Honey Fitz had done, but on a national scale. In 1932 he supported Roosevelt before the convention and gave $15,000 to the Democratic campaign fund, lent it $50,000 more, and probably contributed many more thousands indirectly. In 1934 the President made him first head of the new Securities and Exchange Commission—to the consternation of some—and, later, head of the Maritime Commission. Two years later, in 1936, Kennedy wrote a ringing endorsement of the Democratic nominee in a book called I’m for Roosevelt, and he gave the Democrats another big campaign donation.

  His book made a forceful case for the main New Deal policies except for a few—notably Roosevelt’s 1936 tax bill—that Kennedy admitted he disliked. Although he hoped his book would help restore “temperate discussion of issues;” he himself ignored his own advice in discussing the attitude of some fashionable and wealthy circles—“an unreasoning, fanatical, blind, irrational prejudice”—against the President. He scored the “privileged aristocrats,” the “ungrateful rich,” and the “modern Bourbons” in phrases that might have been struck off by Roosevelt himself. Some people were annoyed that Kennedy, a speculator himself, could criticize the rich so sharply; but perhaps this was not so hard for a businessman who had never been wholly accepted in certain circles of the business world. On one occasion, indeed, he pleased Roosevelt by quoting a Frenchman as saying that the President had exploded one of the most popular concepts in America in dissociating the concept of wealth from the concept of virtue.

  The President thought the book “splendid” and a help not only in the campaign but in the “sane education” of the country. Those who read the book carefully might have noticed that its support for the New Deal, while vigorous, was narrowly based. Kennedy liked the New Deal for its emphasis on welfare and security, for its bread-and-butter liberalism. He knew of “no higher duty or more noble function of the state,” he said, “than caring for the needy among our citizens,” and he quoted in his support the famous encyclical of Pope Leo XIII on the condition of the working classes. The noneconomic elements of liberalism—the relation of the New Deal to individual freedom—he laid aside scornfully as “question begging abstractions.” What matters a vote to a hungry man? he demanded.

  He was away from home often during the late summer of 1936 setting up businessmen’s organizations for Roosevelt and looking for men in finance and business who would support the New Deal. But during the late ’30’s he became disenchanted with the direction of the New Deal. He said little publicly, and he remained on friendly personal terms with Roosevelt, but the radical fiscal policies he had begun to oppose in the first term disturbed him even more during the second.

  Now in his late forties, Kennedy had become a national figure—a big, intense man, with sandy hair thinning a bit over a freckled forehead and horn-rimmed glasses that gave him a slightly owlish look. But he always remained something of an enigma to the public. For one thing, it was hard to place him. A strong Roosevelt man, he was yet so repugnant to liberals that they had greeted his SEC appointment as “grotesque,” “appalling,” “literally incredible”—a big-pool operator regulating his fellow sharks. Generally he had been conservative politically, but he had supported the La Follette–Wheeler Progressive ticket in 1924. He had made money out of movies in their pre-Legion of Decency days but he was a devout Catholic and a friend of Cardinal Pacelli, later Pope Pius XII. Then, too, his friends seemed a curious collection—William Randolph Hearst, Father Coughlin, but also, when he won their confidence by his direction of the SEC, New Dealers like James Landis, Ben Cohen, and Tom Corcoran. The man himself was unpredictable, one moment overcoming you with his blarney, the next moment hard as steel, sometimes endlessly patient, then suddenly blowing up in a real Irish temper. And where did he live, anyway—Boston, New York, Hollywood, Washington, Palm Beach? He seemed to have homes everywhere.

  Appearances were not too deceiving; Kennedy was indeed a lone wolf whom very few men knew. He never stayed in one job or enterprise very long; the moment he stepped in he seemed to be planning when he wanted to get out. He was never wholly accepted by either the business community or the liberals. The respectable rich looked on him as a political opportunist, the liberals as a Wall Street plunger. And of course there was the old problem of the Yankees. Kennedy left Boston primarily because he considered their attitude frigid and aloof. People were more tolerant in New York and Hollywood. But everywhere he went, he was labeled as an Irishman.

  “I was born here,” he exploded one day. “My children were born here. What the hell do I have to do to be an American?”

  No Terrors at Home

  Joe Kennedy’s great consolation in these strenuous years was his family. Indeed, he justified his feverish money-making largely as a way of ensuring his nine children’s security in the years to come. Explaining to visitors why he could go on despite suspicion and criticism, he liked to quote a senator’s reply to an angry voter who threatened to drive him out of office: “Home holds no terrors for me.”

  He was often away from home. Once, he spent seven straight weeks juggling stock in a room in the old Waldorf Astoria. He woke up one morning, exhausted, and realized that his new baby, Patricia, was almost a month old and he had not even seen her. He tried, however, to get home weekends whenever it was possible. When the children were small, he pulled them around the snowy streets of Brookline in a homemade soapbox sled. According to a family story, once he almost lost his oldest son. While Joe, Sr. was thinking about far-off matters, Joe, Jr. toppled off the sled and was not found until later, playing merrily in the snow. As the children grew older, their father plunged into their games and contests with gusto—tennis, swimming, softball, sailing, golf—and he was usually able to hold his own.

  Even among his family, however, Kennedy could not escape from the press of finance and politics; perhaps he did not try. At home he was pursued by telegrams and long-distance calls, and the house was full of aides, politic
ians, financiers. Visitors would find him happily stretched out on the big porch at Hyannisport, a stock-market ticker chattering away at his side.

  Actually, Kennedy had no wish to seal his children off from the outside world. They might as well know at the start that it was harshly competitive. “Every single kid,” a close friend of the family told a reporter, “was raised to think, First, what shall I do about this problem? Second, what will Dad say about my solution of it?” When he was home he encouraged talk at the dinner table about American government and politics, but money matters could not be raised. “I have never discussed money with my wife and family,” Kennedy said years later, “and I never will.”

  The father wanted his children to be competitive with one another, and they vied among themselves fiercely in parlor games and sports. Sometimes the girls would leave the tennis courts sobbing after being bested by their brothers. Touch football games were almost fratricidal. “They are the most competitive and at the same time the most cohesive family I’ve ever seen,” said another long-time family friend some years after. “They fight each other, yet they feed on each other. They stimulate each other. Their minds strike sparks. Each of them has warm friends. But none they like and admire so much as they like and admire their own brothers and sisters.”

  He wanted his children, however competitive they might be with one another, to present a united front against the outside world. Consciously or not, he was copying the ways of his father and the Democratic bosses of old, who allowed fighting among the district leaders between elections but not on the day when they had to beat Republicans. The fierce loyalty of the Kennedys to each other exists to this day and has been especially helpful to John Kennedy in his political campaigns.

  During Kennedy’s long absences, Joe, Jr. increasingly assumed his father’s family responsibilities. He taught the others how to sail and swim with something of Joe, Sr.’s perfectionism. Indeed, he was much like his father—generous, considerate, and loving, and, at the same time, driving, domineering, and hot-tempered.

  But the main steadying element in this boisterous household was Rose Kennedy. Even as a young woman, she impressed her friends with her scrupulous sense of duty and her devotion to the church. What she lacked in intellectual brilliance she made up in her intense love for her family. Love and a sense of duty were needed in the Kennedy home. The children were so numerous that she had to keep records of their vaccinations, illnesses, food problems, and the like, on file cards, but she was still able to give each child some individual attention. Somehow she survived and even thrived, keeping her face unlined and her figure as modish as ever. Years later, on meeting this mother of nine still looking so young, a gallant gentleman took her hand and exclaimed, “At last—I believe in the stork!”

  In her husband’s absence, she would even work up current-events topics and guide the discussion of them by the children at the table—her husband would have expected it. With him away so often and for so long, the daily routine, despite household help, was not simple, certainly not so easy as it later seemed to some of the family. Occasionally—and more often as the children went off to school—she got out from under her big family by taking vacations with her husband in Florida or Europe. She also devoted herself increasingly to the church. “She was terribly religious,” Kennedy says. “She was a little removed, and still is, which I think is the only way to survive when you have nine children. I thought she was a very model mother for a big family.”

  2THE GREEN BLOODS

  John Fitzgerald Kennedy was born on May 29, 1917, in Brookline, a suburb of Boston. America had just entered the war, and about this time his father left to take his post at the Fore River shipyards. For several years the family lived at 83 Beals Street, in a large frame house set back a bit from the sidewalk on a small plot. It was a quiet, lower-middle-class area, the other side of town from East Boston. Here Jack spent his early childhood—years that he hardly remembers today.

  As his father became more prosperous, the family moved to higher-class houses and neighborhoods, pursuing the Yankee blue bloods, who still outdistanced them in social prestige. The next stop on the way was on the corner of Naples and Abbotsford Roads in Brookline, in a bigger house with a dozen rooms for the rapidly growing Kennedy family. Here Jack and his older brother, Joe, romped on the long porch that stretched halfway around the house, read picture books in front of the fireplaces in the old-fashioned, high-ceilinged living room and parlor, raced each other under the shade trees outside. Here, too, Jack first went to grade school. Dexter School, about six blocks from the Kennedy home, was a private academy, but not a parochial school; Joe and Jack may have been at the time its only Catholic students.

  Sometimes Grandpa Fitz, still a booster of Boston, would pick the boys up and take them to a Red Sox game or to the swan boats in Boston’s Public Garden or to some other favorite haunt. One of Jack’s earliest memories is of touring the wards with his grandfather when Fitz was running for governor in 1922. Fitz even tried out some of his speeches with the six-year-old boy as an audience of one. Rose took the older children on historical pilgrimages—to the Yankee landmarks of Plymouth Rock, Concord Bridge, and Bunker Hill—strengthening their allegiance to the family’s adopted land. Sundays the family drove over to spend the afternoon with old Pat Kennedy, who was now in his sixties and less active in politics. To the children, Grandfather Kennedy was a kind but somewhat awesome figure. “On those Sunday afternoon visits he wouldn’t let us cut up or even wink in his presence,” Kennedy recalls.

  But the pleasant Boston days were soon over. Joseph Kennedy had outgrown his native city, and he settled his family near the center of his New York financial empire, first in Riverdale and then in Bronxville. The Bronxville house has since been torn down and the lot subdivided, but it was a rather affluent place surrounded by broad lawns where the children played baseball and football. Jack went to fourth, fifth, and sixth grades at nearby Riverdale School; the teachers remembered him later as a rather slight boy, polite, industrious, and likable, with a special interest in English history—and a hot temper. His mother came to school often to check solicitously on her son’s progress; his father sometimes invited the teachers to the house to see private showings of the latest movies.

  Looking back today, Kennedy cannot remember any unhappy times during his childhood. It was an easy, prosperous life, supervised by maids and nurses, with more and more younger sisters to boss and to play with. Closest to him in age was Rosemary, but she was a sweet, rather withdrawn girl, not up to the children’s competitive life. Jack’s favorite among them was the second oldest girl, Kathleen, nicknamed “Kick.” She loved games and sports and often could hold her own with her older brother.

  Even as a boy, Jack showed some of the skill at persuasion that would mark his political career later. He addressed a strategic “Plea for a raise” to his father (with a slight Biblical overtone—I Corinthians 13):

  “My recent allowance is 40¢,” the petition began. “This I used for aeroplanes and other playthings of childhood but now I am a scout and I put away my childish things. Before I would spend 20¢ of my 40¢ allowance and in five minutes I would have empty pockets and nothing to gain and 20¢ to lose. When I am a scout I have to buy canteens, haversacks, blankets, searchlicgs, poncho things that will last for years and I can always use it while I can’t use chocolate marshmallow Sunday ice cream and so I put in my plea for a raise of thirty cents for me to buy schut things and pay my own way around.…” There is no record of the effect of the petition on his father.

  Canterbury and Choate

  At thirteen, Jack left his Bronxville home for boarding school. For a year he went to Canterbury School in New Milford, Connecticut, the only Catholic school he ever attended. After an initial bout with homesickness—“I felt pretty homesick but it’s O.K. now”—he settled easily into the life of the school. “We have chapel every morning and evening,” he wrote to his mother, “and I will be quite pius I guess when I get home
.” (For years he had trouble with his spelling; “I learnt how to play baggamon to-day,” he wrote from Canterbury, and he had gone out for “football pracite.”) He showed early a trait that baffles his office staff today—an almost photographic memory for correspondence, conversations, and historical fact, but an almost total absent-mindedness about where he has mislaid speeches, books, and clothing. “We are reading Ivanhoe in English,” he wrote to his father from school, “and though I may not be able to remember material things such as tickets, gloves and so on I can remember things like Ivanhoe and the last time we had an exam on it I got a ninety eight.” Always a ready competitor, he tried out for football, baseball, and other sports, with fair success. He reported that he could swim fifty yards in thirty seconds; this swimming skill would save his life many years later.

  By the fall of 1930, the Depression was on, and Jack, hearing fragments in between school activities, followed the distant news from the outside world. “Please send me the Litary Digest,” he wrote his father, “because I did not know about the Market Slump until a long time after, or a paper. Please send me some golf balls.…” His studies at Canterbury went only moderately well. His main trouble was Latin; one month his Latin marks averaged 55. “He can do better than this,” his teacher reported. The year at Canterbury was cut short at Easter by a severe attack of appendicitis, and Jack never returned.

  The next fall he shifted to Choate, a rather select private school with a strong Episcopal flavor, in Wallingford, Connecticut, where Adlai Stevenson and Chester Bowles had been students years before. Joe, Jr. was there, making out well. The boys’ father chose Choate because he wanted them to mix and compete with a greater variety of boys than in a Catholic school. Here they could meet the sons of upper-class Yankees on their own ground. Kennedy today can recall no evidence of feeling against him at Choate because of his Catholicism. On his part he dutifully lived up to his religious obligations as he knew his mother would want him to do. “I received Communion this morning and am going to Church on tuesday,” he wrote his parents his first winter at Choate. “I received the prayer-book and would you please send me a puff because it is very cold.…”