From the beginning, “Rosie” was the apple of her father’s eye, and he in turn became the dominant figure in her life, notwithstanding his frequent absences. “Rose was like her father for all the world,” a childhood friend commented years afterwards. “She was always quoting her father—in fact, we used to call her ‘Father Says.’ ”57 From a young age, Rose accompanied Fitzgerald on political trips (in 1897, at age seven, she met President William McKinley in the White House), and she developed a deep and lasting love of politics that neither her mother nor her siblings nor even her future husband—for all his political ambition for himself and his sons—remotely shared. She relished it all, not merely the campaign rallies, with their blaring brass bands and blizzards of confetti, but also the backroom strategizing and the secret maneuvering that made election victories happen and governing take place. “She damn well knows all the nuts and bolts of politics,” her son Jack’s press secretary Pierre Salinger would marvel decades later, after watching her in action in two campaigns. “She knows how to get votes out, how you make the phone calls, raise money, and all that; and as a speaker, she’s an absolute spellbinder.”58
John “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald and Mary Josephine “Josie” Fitzgerald, circa 1889.
Over time, Rose began taking on some of her mother’s political duties. With her deep shyness, Josie Fitzgerald hated the ceremonial rounds she was expected to make as a political wife; when she relented and took part, her distaste was palpable and she came off as cold and forbidding. Rose, starting in her mid-teens, stepped in, acting as hostess and greeter at myriad Honey Fitz campaign events and joining him at banquets, ship launches, and building dedications. She became, indeed, a kind of substitute wife. She loved every minute, and won accolades from the press for her precocity and striking beauty. There was something regal about her bearing, observers remarked, owing to her perfect posture and the sureness of her movement. Her skill at piano accompaniment came in handy, too, at many of these mayoral events, as her father loved nothing more than to unleash his Irish tenor and belt out “Sweet Adeline” whenever it was requested, and often when it wasn’t.
In June 1906, Rose graduated from Dorchester High. Not yet sixteen, she was the youngest person ever to graduate from the school, and ranked third in a class of 285. Petite and graceful, she had shiny black curly hair and a winning smile, and she radiated poise as she strode across the stage at graduation. On hand to award her the diploma was none other than her father, the mayor, brimming with pride, the moment captured by a photo that ran in The Boston Post the following day. “Most Beautiful Girl Graduate?” blared the headline, no doubt with encouragement from the mayor.59
VII
Rose seemed to have the world in her hand, and she soon had another reason to be thrilled: she found love. That same summer, back at Old Orchard Beach in Maine, she and Joe Kennedy met properly for the first time. Though their encounter was brief, she was smitten by his energy and athletic good looks.60 That fall, he invited her to a dance at Boston Latin. She wanted desperately to say yes but turned down the invitation, because her father “refused to let me go. He disapproved of a girl of sixteen going around to dances in strange places and meeting people who might cause trouble.”61 Undaunted, Rose and Joe carried on a nominally secret relationship that school year while she took college preparatory classes at Dorchester High and attended lectures about European culture and languages at the Lowell Institute, in Boston. He would meet her after lectures and walk her (almost) all the way home, or they would arrange to rendezvous at friends’ parties.
“During that last year at Dorchester High, and the following year,” Rose recalled, “Joe and I managed to see each other rather often. Less often than we would have liked, but more often than my father was aware of.” Joe’s class book in his graduation year at Boston Latin punningly predicted that he would “earn his living in a very round-a-bout way. He will run the flying horses at ‘Severe’ beach [a reference to the carousel at Revere Beach]; on every horse there will be a pretty Rose—that is where the Rose Fitz.”62
The Kennedys and the Fitzgeralds vacationing in Old Orchard Beach, Maine, in 1907. P. J. is second from left, Rose is third from left, Honey Fitz is fourth from left, and Joe is second from right.
Rose’s father had other ideas. Though a union of his daughter with Joe Kennedy would bring together two of the most prominent Irish families in Boston and generate lavish press attention, Fitzgerald frowned on the relationship. Perhaps he felt Joe wasn’t good enough for his daughter, or perhaps he sensed even then that the young man would not be a true and devoted partner. And perhaps, too, Fitzgerald’s own low-wattage rivalry with P. J. Kennedy influenced his thinking, as he seemed much more keen on another Harvard-educated Irish Catholic suitor, Hugh Nawn, the handsome son of a wealthy Dorchester contractor. (Rose liked Hugh well enough but thought he lacked Joe’s charisma.) Whatever the case, when Rose’s ardor for Joe refused to cool, Fitzgerald took a more dramatic step: in 1908 he shipped her and her sister Agnes off to a Sacred Heart convent in the Netherlands.
Her father’s decisions regarding her education frustrated Rose to no end. He had already quashed her desire to attend Wellesley College, to which she had been admitted—too secular, he determined, and besides, at seventeen she was too young to matriculate. Now he was shipping her abroad, and to a convent. Ever the dutiful daughter, however, Rose took the decisions with minimal complaint. Her letters home indicate that she profited in important ways from the experience, not least by cultivating the cosmopolitan interest she had in the world outside the United States. Her proficiency in French improved considerably, and she studied German as well. The convent’s strictly regimented schedule did not keep the two girls from traveling to various parts of the Continent and reporting home rapturously about their experiences. To her surprise, Rose found that she did not mind the devotional emphasis and strict routines of the school.63
She didn’t mention in her letters home that she kept Joe Kennedy’s photo on the table in her room, or that she missed him terribly. The feeling was mutual. For Joe, Mayor Fitzgerald’s opposition to him only sweetened the prize, only made him more determined to have what he considered the prettiest, most famous Catholic girl in the city. Upon Rose’s return to the United States in mid-1909, she and Kennedy picked up right where they had left off, though their meetings were sporadic, as Rose spent the next academic year in New York at the Academy of the Sacred Heart, a girls’ boarding school (which would become Manhattanville College).64 Only in 1910, with her return to Boston, could the romance fully resume, with carefully planned meetings in Harvard Yard, in friends’ homes, and in the Christian Science church, where no one would think to look for them. When, in January 1911, Rose had her coming-out with a splashy debut party at her parents’ home, Joe was present, as were his parents and some four hundred other guests, including every notable Democratic politician in the city. The press was there, too, of course, reporting the following day that the lovely debutante was the belle of Irish Boston, looking sublime in her white chiffon dress.65
Eventually, her father relented in his opposition to Joe Kennedy’s courtship. He could see her determination, and furthermore he had to acknowledge, however grudgingly, that Joe brought a lot of attractive attributes to the table—education, ambition, affability, good looks, and a kind of superhuman stamina that could rival Fitzgerald’s own. In addition, Kennedy was already making impressive moves in his young career. On leaving Harvard, he had set his sights high, aiming to crack Boston’s financial institutions, still tightly controlled by the Yankee Protestants. That is to say, he went into banking. From a young age and right through college, he had shown a talent for profit-making enterprises, and he grasped early on that power came from money.*2 He had a head for numbers, and had made useful contacts while at Harvard with students whose families controlled the city’s leading banks. Besides, as he later told an interviewer, “Bankin
g could lead a man anywhere, as it played an important part in every business.”66
Rose Fitzgerald in 1911, the year of her official debut to Boston society.
Upon his graduation, in 1912, Kennedy got himself appointed as a state bank examiner, a position that allowed him to see bank records and books throughout the greater Boston area and to learn how the banks operated and made their money. From there he cleverly maneuvered his way into the presidency of East Boston’s Columbia Trust, a small bank his father had helped found in the mid-1890s. At just twenty-five, he was reportedly the youngest bank president in the state, perhaps in the country. And he was determined to make good. Commuting daily by train from the family home in Winthrop (P. J., after losing a race for street commissioner in 1908, had pulled up stakes and moved the family to a rambling home in this coastal enclave), Joe put in long hours and made use of every possible family connection to breathe new life into a trust company that had been losing assets. Often he skipped lunch or made do with crackers and milk at his desk.
Joe was popular with the immigrants who made up the bulk of the bank’s clientele. Eschewing the stodgy, standoffish reserve of many bankers, he mingled and joked with his clients, many of them poor, and earned their respect with his friendly demeanor and his efforts on their behalf. Strong personal relations with customers were key to business success, Kennedy preached to his staff, and he modeled the message. Stories were legion of his helping clients in desperate economic circumstances who had been turned down by other banks. Less commonly reported was that he always kept an eye on the bottom line—he could be as quick as any banker in calling a loan or foreclosing a mortgage.67
The strenuous efforts paid off: in short order Kennedy, an instinctive businessman for whom dealmaking came easily, boosted deposits and brought in new business for Columbia Trust. Within six months he had increased the bank’s holdings by 27 percent. Even Honey Fitz had to tip his hat.68
For his part, Fitzgerald soon had bigger things to worry about. For years, his mayoralty had been dogged by charges of corruption, with sworn testimony of payoffs and cronyism. Then, in 1913, a fellow Democrat named James Michael Curley announced that he would challenge Fitzgerald’s quest for reelection. An unscrupulous and silver-tongued demagogue, Curley, who at six feet and two hundred pounds dwarfed his opponent, learned that Fitzgerald had been carrying on with a curvaceous blond cigarette girl named Elizabeth “Toodles” Ryan, whom he’d met in a hotel bar. Curley sent a letter to Josie threatening to make the affair public if her husband did not withdraw as a candidate. When Honey Fitz refused to get out of the race, Curley announced publicly that he would give a series of high-profile lectures, including “Great Lovers in History: From Cleopatra to Toodles” and “Libertines: From Henry VIII to the Present Day.” In short order, Fitzgerald’s office announced he would not be running after all. A ditty began making the rounds: “A whiskey glass and Toodles’ ass / made a horse’s ass / out of Honey Fitz.”69
In late December 1913, newspapers began speculating about a possible engagement between Rose Fitzgerald and Joseph Kennedy. The official announcement came on June 20, 1914, after Joe presented Rose with a flawless two-carat diamond he had purchased at discount from a Harvard classmate who had entered his family jewelry business.
One week later, Franz Ferdinand, archduke of Austria-Hungary, was assassinated in Sarajevo, at the hands of a sixteen-year-old Bosnian Serb nationalist. At first, few Americans paid much attention—the crisis seemed no worse than those that had preceded it in the Balkans since 1908 and been resolved peacefully. But this time the Austrians, urged on by their ally Germany, sought to crush the Serbs for good, and the result was a cascade of events that led, in early August, to the start of the First World War. As armies across Europe mobilized, the United States, under President Woodrow Wilson, declared its neutrality, a position the nation would steadfastly maintain for another two and a half years.70
On October 7, 1914, in the midst of a war-induced financial downturn, Rose and Joe were married. Cardinal William O’Connell presided, and Honey Fitz gave the bride away. Acceding to Rose’s wishes, her parents kept the reception small (a prudent move, perhaps, in view of her father’s recent scandal), whereupon bride and groom honeymooned in Philadelphia (where they took in the first two games of the World Series between the Boston Braves and the Philadelphia Athletics) and White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, where they spent their days riding, golfing, and playing tennis. On Sunday, October 25, they returned to Boston, and that Wednesday, the twenty-eighth, they moved to the sturdy and unassuming house on Beals Street.71
On July 25, 1915, nine months to the day after they returned from the honeymoon, Rose gave birth to the couple’s first child, Joseph Patrick Kennedy Jr. An exuberant Honey Fitz reported of his first grandson that “his mother and father have already decided that he is going to be president of the United States.”72 Twenty-two months after that, on May 29, 1917, on the heels of America’s fateful entry in the war, came child number two. His parents named him John Fitzgerald Kennedy.
*1 The record would stand, for a sailing ship, for 135 years, until 1989.
*2 In the summers before and after his final year at Harvard, Joe invested in a sightseeing bus, the Mayflower, with his friend Joe Donovan. While Donovan drove, Joe narrated. In two seasons, running from late spring to early fall, the partners cleared several thousand dollars each.
TWO
CHILDISH THINGS
John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s birth in May 1917 coincided with a turning point in American and world history, the effects of which would reverberate through the decades and have immense implications for Kennedy’s life and career, right down to his death in Dallas forty-six years later. On April 6, the United States entered the First World War, a move that, all the combatant nations agreed, mattered enormously for a struggle that was then deep into its third bloody year, with no end in sight. In May, Congress passed the Selective Service Act to raise an army for the war effort, and by June the first American troops had arrived in France. Upheaval in Russia, meanwhile, had forced Tsar Nicholas II to abdicate, ending centuries of tsarist rule and causing that nation’s war effort to all but collapse. A liberal provisional government took over and pledged to keep Russia in the fight, but turmoil festered, and on April 16 Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, leader of the revolutionary Bolshevik Party, arrived in Petrograd (St. Petersburg) to a tumultuous reception after a decade in exile. Within months, Lenin’s Bolsheviks would seize power and take Russia out of the war.1
U.S. entry into World War I marked the real start, it may be said, of the American Century, which would last through the end of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, and during which the United States would emerge as the greatest power—in economic, political, and military terms—the world had ever seen.2 The Russian Revolution, for its part, would shape global politics in profound ways long after the Bolsheviks consolidated control of the huge Russian landmass and then proclaimed a still larger Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. In time, the United States and the USSR became superpowers and were pitted in a decades-long Cold War in which decisions in Washington and Moscow dominated international politics. Writing of the long epoch that drew to a close with the end of that Soviet-American confrontation in the late 1980s, historian Eric Hobsbawm called it “a world shaped by the impact of the Russian Revolution of 1917.”3
If all this was still in the future when Joseph and Rose Kennedy’s second child made his entrance into the world in the upstairs master bedroom at 83 Beals Street shortly after 3:00 P.M. on the afternoon of May 29, some sagacious observers could see the general outline of things to come.*1 Three-quarters of a century before, in 1835, the French analyst Alexis de Tocqueville had already foreseen the day when the United States would stand astride much of the world, on account of its geographic advantages and potential for growth.4 By the turn of the century such assessments were routine, for
the young nation was an economic and demographic steamroller.5 The United States already had 200,000 miles of railway track in 1900—more than all of Europe—and was the world’s largest producer of wheat, coal, and iron. A single industrialist, Andrew Carnegie, produced more steel than the whole of England put together. At the outbreak of war in 1914, the American share of world manufacturing stood at 32 percent (up from 23.6 in 1900), as compared with Great Britain at 13.6 percent (down from 18.5 in 1900). Over the previous half century, since the end of the Civil War, the U.S. economy had grown faster than any economy had ever grown before—by an astronomical margin—fueled in good part by the arrival of millions of enterprising immigrants who, uneducated and poor though they might be, had ambition, energy, and intelligence in abundance.6
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