JFK
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Nor does the evidence support the claim, common in books as well as documentary films, that Jack Kennedy became a politician because his father decreed it, following the death of Joe Junior, his golden firstborn, in 1944. In reality, Jack was musing about seeking elected office at least two years earlier, in early 1942. His boyhood had been imbued by the political legend of his beloved grandfather John “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald, and he relished hearing stories about the feats and foibles of earlier generations of Irish Catholic pols in Boston. In college he gravitated toward the study of government, and a later flirtation with law school was in part a manifestation of his deep interest in politics. No doubt the father’s relentless advocacy after Joe’s death was an additional spur, and it’s interesting to speculate about which path Jack might have selected had his brother returned from the war alive. But he had his own reasons for choosing politics, and of the two brothers he could arguably claim the stronger credentials for the endeavor—as Joe Junior grasped all too well. During Jack’s initial campaigns for the House (in 1946) and the Senate (in 1952), Joe Senior played an important role, not least in keeping his checkbook open at all times. Contrary to legend, however, he never drove campaign strategy, in either race. The son, never much impressed with his father’s political acumen, preserved the key decision-making slot for himself. In the epic 1952 nail-biter against Republican Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., the paramount subordinate family part was played not by Joe Senior but by Jack’s twenty-six-year-old brother, Robert.
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Ultimately, the Kennedy who emerges in these pages is not the callow young man of our imaginations. At least not in the main, and at least not after he graduated from college. He could be vain and self-centered, could be heedless of friends, heedless of women. He cheated on his wife, Jackie, before their wedding, and he cheated on her afterwards. To him, as to others in his wealthy family, people were often viewed as interchangeable. (Which did not keep him from showing deep loyalty to a chosen few—namely, to his male friends and to his core staff, who repaid the loyalty in full.)15 But that was not the sum total of the man. Behind the handsome face and the winsome smile was an insatiably curious individual, a poised and discerning analyst who treated serious things seriously yet largely avoided—thanks to his highly developed sense of irony and the absurd, and his self-deprecating wit—the trap of self-importance.16 His historical sensibility and his recurring health travails taught him that life was capricious and fraught, but he didn’t take from this that he should use his family’s fortune to pursue a path of pure indulgence. On the contrary, these hardships deepened his determination to follow his parents’ exhortation, issued regularly to their kids, to contribute to society, to believe in something greater than themselves and to act accordingly.
Signs of this emerging seriousness were evident early; he was no late bloomer, as is often suggested. Already in his undergraduate papers, Kennedy grappled with questions concerning political leadership that would fascinate and vex him to the end of his days. Is it possible for democratic leaders to respond nimbly and effectively in times of national or international crisis? How can policymakers reconcile their sense of the nation’s interests with the fickle demands of their constituents? What is the nature of political courage? (“Unless democracy can produce able leaders,” he wrote in one college essay, “its chances of survival are slight.”) In letters home from the South Pacific in 1943, he expressed doubts about the efficacy of military leadership and about war as an instrument of policy that would deepen in the years ahead. “The war here is a dirty business,” he wrote to his ex-girlfriend Inga Arvad. “We get so used to talking about billions of dollars and millions of soldiers, and thousands of casualties begin to sound like drops in the bucket. But if those thousands want to live as much as my PT boat crew, the people deciding the whys and wherefores had better make mighty sure that all this effort is headed for some definite goal and that when we reach that goal we may say it was worth it.” In late 1951, following two lengthy overseas trips covering much of the world, he revised his easy Cold War verities and told a nationwide radio audience that the Communist threat “cannot be met effectively by merely the force of arms. It is the peoples themselves that must be led to reject it, and it is to those peoples that our policies must be directed.” Democratic ideals, he was saying, mattered more than military power. This, too, was a theme to which he would return often, including as president.17
Even that most celebrated of Kennedy appeals, “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country,” from the 1961 inaugural, had early roots. It had been drilled into him at Choate, his prep school alma mater. When, in 1946, he returned to the school to give an address, he urged the students to be engaged citizens and to answer the call to public service.18 On the stump that year, in his first election campaign, he elaborated the argument, sounding tones that seem especially resonant in our own time. Beware lazy cynicism about politics and politicians, the skinny twenty-nine-year-old candidate implored audiences, for the survival of democracy depended on having an informed and active citizenry, committed to reasoned discourse and accepting of good-faith bargaining between the parties. He employed the language of empathy, emphasizing Americans’ shared dreams and shared destiny as a people. Neither then nor later was Kennedy above bare-knuckle politics or partisan sparring, but he grasped already in this first race that compromise is necessary to a well-functioning democracy, and that civility in the public realm prevents dehumanization and helps us see political opponents as adversaries, not enemies. His 1956 book, Profiles in Courage, is an ode to the art of politics, to the hard and vital work of governing in a system of conflicting pressures and visions.
Perhaps it’s this abiding faith in his nation and its democratic politics that explains most fully the enduring hold of John F. Kennedy’s legacy. From his earliest days as a politician right to the end in Texas, Kennedy summoned the narrative of American hope as he challenged people to believe in a better society at home while embracing the nation’s leadership position abroad. It was a capacious vision, one that rejected the parochial nationalism of his father and extolled the promise of public activism. Today, whether we question this governing philosophy or yearn for its rebirth, we still see Kennedy as the dynamic young figure who seized the mantle of leadership, and we wonder what might have been had he lived.19 We’ll never know, no matter how much we imagine. But we can learn much about this singular and surprising life, and about the nation and the world in which he came of age, if we delve deeply into who he really was.
PART
I
FOUNDATIONS
The Kennedys in Hyannis Port in 1934. Seated, from left: Pat, Bobby, Rose, Jack, and Joe, with Teddy on his lap. Standing, from left: Joe Junior, Kick, Rosemary, Eunice, and, in front of her, Jean.
ONE
TWO FAMILIES
John F. Kennedy’s birthplace, at 83 Beals Street in Brookline, Massachusetts, is today a national historic site. To a modern visitor the home feels confined, with a compact kitchen and modest-size bedrooms, but in the fall of 1914, when Joseph Kennedy bought the house to raise what he and his wife, Rose, hoped would be a large family, it seemed ideal, situated as it was on a pleasant street in a middle-class neighborhood made up of people like themselves, who had ambitions but not much cash, who sought a good address as proof they had arrived—or were arriving. The trolley to Boston was but a short walk away, and St. Aidan’s Roman Catholic Church and the Edward Devotion public school were nearby. To finance the purchase, Joe borrowed $2,000 for the down payment and took a mortgage for the remaining $4,500.1
The street, named after the wealthy speculator who originally bought the land, had been laid out only two decades earlier, during the streetcar boom of the 1890s. In the years thereafter, a variety of tightly packed brick-and-timber tract homes popped up on both sides of the street, behind sidewalks and tastefully planted maple trees
. But with the economic downturn of 1910, construction stopped, and in 1914, number 83 was the last house in the row, beyond which stood a succession of empty plots to the next corner. With a gabled roof and a large white front porch where toddlers could play, the five-year-old home boasted three bedrooms on the second floor and two more on the third, while the kitchen featured a large black-iron coal-and-gas stove.2
Brookline in 1914 was one of the wealthiest municipalities in the Northeast, which surely added to its allure for the young Joe Kennedy. He could not yet afford to live in the pricier neighborhoods south of Boylston Street, with their grand homes and manicured gardens along gently winding streets, but at least he and Rose were now residents of the town. For the better part of a century, many of the biggest names in Boston society had kept summer homes in Brookline. Over time, some opted to make the quiet summer town their year-round residence, adopting the English model of an aristocratic elite rooted in the country, the better to separate themselves from the seamy underside of industrialization and the influx of immigrants. The Lowells, Cabots, Sargents, Amorys, Codmans, and other prominent families all came, creating a larger concentration of Brahmins than in perhaps any other town in the region.3 As the money flowed in, Brookline acquired more urban services than most surrounding towns; by the 1850s, it had one of the best school systems in New England, as well as an excellent public library; by the turn of the century, there were sewers and telephone lines. Although the town housed a sizable working-class population to serve the needs of the wealthy and had a growing middle class, 36 percent of the town’s residents were wealthy enough to employ live-in domestic servants.4
The first family home, and Jack’s birthplace, 83 Beals Street, Brookline.
History does not record whether Joe and Rose, on their first evening in that new home, reflected on how far their respective families had come since their grandparents arrived from Ireland six decades before. Joe in particular was not the introspective sort. But they needed no one to tell them that they were benefiting from improvements in the lot of Irish Americans scarcely imaginable to that earlier generation.
II
Patrick Kennedy wasn’t thinking that far ahead in October 1848 when he made his way on foot—so it is said—from Dunganstown, a town in southwest County Wexford, along the River Barrow, down to New Ross, six miles away, to board a ship to Liverpool and from there, he hoped, to the New World.5 He was just trying to escape an Ireland that was three years into a catastrophic famine.
In 1845, following an unusually wet summer, a mysterious blight caused the potato crop to fail. The disease had crossed the Atlantic on ships bound for European ports and thence reached Ireland, carried across the Irish Sea by rain and wind. Desperate farmers and peasants tried to stop the scourge by cutting off the blackened leaves and stalks, only to find that the tubers had rotted completely. For a time farmers assumed it was a fluke event, a one-off, but early in 1846 the deadly fungus reappeared, and by the end of that summer more than 90 percent of Ireland’s potato crop was gone. By early October, many Irish towns reported having not a single loaf of bread or pound of grain to feed their residents. A harsh winter followed, with cold rains and snow, and in 1847 potato yields were a fraction of what they had been in 1844.6
This might have been less of a problem had not the potato been such a staple of the Irish diet. Introduced to Ireland in the late sixteenth century, it became in time critically important. More than half of the population of eight million relied on it as their main source of nourishment; upwards of a third, including the poorest of the poor, survived on it almost exclusively. The potato was an ideal subsistence food for Irish peasants, since it was highly nutritious (the Irish were among the tallest and most fertile people in Europe, if also perhaps the most impoverished) and since impressive yields could be had on small plots of land and even in poor conditions. Except when the crop failed. As conditions deteriorated, hunger spread, then starvation. Some families took to the road, wandering from village to village, hoping forlornly that someone would take them in. Others waited in their cottages, shared their remaining morsels, and died quietly, one by one. Many who avoided starvation succumbed to typhus, which spread rapidly among the weakened population.
All told, about one million people died between 1846 and 1851 from starvation or disease, a figure amounting to 13 percent of Ireland’s population. The effects were most severe in the west and southwest—in Mayo and Clare and Kerry, people died by the tens of thousands—but Wexford, too, suffered greatly. “Deaths from famine had been numerous…caused by the utter want of food,” reported the Wexford Independent in January 1847, and one shopkeeper wrote that “the young and old are dying as fast as they can bury them, [for] the fever is rageing here at such arate that there are in healthy in the morning knows not but in the Evening may have taken the infection.”7
The worst of the suffering might have been avoided had British authorities been more attentive or compassionate. But Parliament’s response was piecemeal and inadequate, confirming for many Irish what they could expect from their alien oppressors across the Irish Sea. For centuries the English had exploited them, maltreated them; why should it be any different now? Many London observers believed that the famine was God’s work and endorsed the view of Charles Trevelyan, the director of government relief, that Ireland’s “great evil” was not famine but “the selfish, perverse and turbulent character of the people.”8 In the summer of 1847, an officially sanctioned soup kitchen program fed almost three million people, suggesting what kind of relief could be mobilized by the British state, but the program was shut down that fall. Under an Irish Poor Law Extension Act, Parliament shifted the burden of famine relief away from central government to local Irish communities, who would ostensibly raise their own tax funds for poor relief. A clause in the law stipulated that any head of household renting more than a tenth of a hectare of land would be ineligible for public assistance. Some tenants starved to death rather than give up land to their landlord; many others abandoned their farms, accepted relief, and, faced with extreme poverty, chose the route of emigration. All told, two million Irish men and women, the majority of them Catholic and from the south and west of the country, fled for points overseas during the decade following the famine’s outbreak. The vast majority ended up in the United States.9
The less fortunate were the first to leave, but they were not the least fortunate in most cases, because the journey required some savings or other assets that could be converted into cash. In the words of economic historian Cormac Ó Gráda, “In the hierarchy of suffering the poorest of the poor emigrated to the next world; those who emigrated to the New World had the resources to escape.”10
Twenty-six-year-old Patrick Kennedy was among the latter. His exact reasons for leaving remain a mystery, but as the third-born son he knew that even if conditions improved, he would have little chance of inheriting the family farm—or of gaining access to any other parcel of land, for that matter. True, the Kennedys were comparatively well-off in Dunganstown, and had been spared the worst of the famine, but even so, the future for someone in Pat’s position was bleak. So he set his sights on the far side of the Atlantic, on “the States,” that strange and wondrous place so often discussed at family gatherings. America offered hope to people like him, and, what’s more, there were already substantial numbers of Irish in the United States to welcome the newcomers to its shores. Pat surely knew as well that conditions on the ships to New York or Boston or Philadelphia were less brutal than on those bound for Quebec, a destination that, moreover, had the disadvantage of being under British rule. (In 1847, an estimated 30 percent of those bound for British North America perished on board or shortly after their arrival in Quebec.) A ticket to Australia, also under British dominion, was too pricey to consider.11
Still, the voyage to America, typically lasting a month and costing $17 to $20 (the equivalent of $550 to $650 today), including provi
sions, was arduous enough. Often, the ships were barely seaworthy; always, they were dangerously overcrowded. Only in fair weather were passengers allowed on deck, and often not even then. The steerage below was cramped—a grown man could not stand without stooping—and unsanitary, and in short order the illnesses that the Irish had fled were sweeping through the crammed holds. Typhus was especially pervasive. Water soon turned foul and could be forced down only with the addition of plentiful amounts of vinegar. Food supplies dwindled, and the stench from the privies became overpowering. Day after day the misery raged on, often in rough weather that created its own misery and stress. Mortality rates were high. As nerves frayed and tempers flared, fights broke out, sometimes leaving the combatants a bloodied mess. Single women faced their own agony: the threat of assault by rapacious sailors.12
It took a healthy disposition and a dose of good luck to survive the passage on these “coffin ships” with mind and body intact. Patrick did. Even upon arrival at port in East Boston (or Noddle’s Island, as it was known, which was still accessible from the mainland only by ferry), his challenges were just beginning. Immigrant Boston was a forbidding land. As he emerged from the shadowy steerage, blinking in the daylight, then crossed over the gangplank onto the brimming dock, Pat would have been met by a motley mix of hucksters and con men, eager to take advantage of the disoriented newcomers by promising pleasant lodgings that often turned out to be squalid and windowless, or well-paying jobs that in reality were backbreaking and might pay one dollar for a fourteen-hour workday.