Yet the United States in 1914 was still a young upstart waiting in the wings of history, a kind of apprentice member of the great-power club. And for the better part of three years, President Woodrow Wilson kept his nation out of the European conflagration. At first he did so by issuing a proclamation of neutrality—the traditional U.S. policy toward European wars—and he asked Americans to refrain from taking sides, to exhibit “the dignity of self-control,” to be “impartial in thought as well as in action.”7 But standing apart proved easier said than done, for Wilson no less than for ordinary Americans. A longtime Anglophile, he soon came to share the British conviction that a victory by the Central powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy) would destroy free enterprise and the rule of law. If Germany won the war, he prophesied, “it would change the course of our civilization and make the United States a military nation.” Several of Wilson’s chief advisers and diplomats—notably his close aide Colonel Edward House; ambassador to London Walter Hines Page; and Robert Lansing, a counselor in the State Department who later became Wilson’s secretary of state—held similar anti-German views, which often translated into anti-German policies.8
U.S. economic ties with the Allied powers of Britain, France, and Russia also rendered neutrality a near-impossible proposition. Britain had long been one of the nation’s leading customers, and early in the fighting it flooded the United States with new orders, especially for munitions. Sales to the Entente—which dwarfed those to the Central powers—helped pull the American economy out of a recession induced by the outbreak of the struggle.9 Much of this trade was financed by private American banks, which extended loans totaling $2.3 billion to Britain and France during the neutrality period. Germany received only $27 million over the same span. The Wilson administration, which initially opposed these transactions on the grounds that they compromised the nation’s neutrality, came to see them as necessary to America’s economic health.10
All the while, the war raged on. For Joe Kennedy, the news of blood-filled trenches only solidified the argument for keeping America out of the war. From the time the first shots were fired in 1914, he determined that this was a European struggle that should be fought by Europeans, and he held to that position tenaciously thereafter. As an Irish American, moreover, he had no desire to suit up for a defense of the British Empire, and he scoffed at the claims by Britain’s propagandists and their U.S. allies that this was an epic existential struggle to save civilization from German barbarism.
A scene from Kennedy’s parents’ home in coastal Winthrop, Massachusetts, at the start of July 1916 is emblematic of his thinking. He had invited some Harvard friends for a weekend at the beach, and the conversation soon turned to the Battle of the Somme, then just getting under way in northern France. All the pals were ebullient about the Allied offensive and the heroism of the British and French soldiers.*2 But not Kennedy. In Rose’s recollection, he initially just listened to his guests’ exuberant chatter and didn’t say much. “He merely shook his head with sadness.” Then, unable to restrain himself any longer, he launched in, saying their “whole attitude was strange and incomprehensible to him.” As he saw it, thousands of young men were about to be mowed down, their lives barely begun, “cut off from the world of their parents and their memories, cut off from their dreams of the future.” And all to capture a piece of territory. “He warned his friends [that] by accepting the idea of the grandeur of the struggle, they themselves were contributing to the momentum of the senseless war, certain to ruin the victors as well as the vanquished.”11
That evening, after a hasty breakup of the gathering, Kennedy went upstairs and, with Rose, checked on the sleeping Joseph Junior, who was just shy of his first birthday. “This is the only happiness that lasts,” he said softly, then walked away.12
The remark gets at a core aspect of Kennedy’s worldview, one that would condition his approach to not only this world war but the one still to come. Cynical about human nature, he tended to see international problems not in moral or geopolitical terms but on the basis of economics; even more, he judged such matters according to what they meant for him personally and for his family. This mindset inclined him toward isolationism in foreign policy, and it opened him to charges of myopia and selfishness.
But there was also power in Joe Kennedy’s analysis that summer day in Winthrop. He might have been a minority of one at this particular gathering, but many thoughtful and informed Americans in 1916 shared his deep skepticism about the supposed “grandeur of the struggle” and his opposition to the United States’ becoming directly engaged in the fighting. However much the war correspondents might romanticize the “terrible beauty” and “glorious purpose” of the Somme fighting, Kennedy grasped the sordid truth: it was wretchedness. On the first day alone, the British lost almost twenty thousand soldiers, some 30 percent of them behind their own lines on account of artillery fire. By the time the battle ended, Britain and France had suffered 600,000 dead or wounded to earn only 125 square miles; the Germans had lost 400,000 men. At Verdun that same year, 336,000 Germans perished, and at Passchendaele, in 1917, more than 370,000 British men died to gain about forty miles of mud and barbed wire. Ambassador Page grew sickened by what Europe had become—“a bankrupt slaughter-house inhabited by unmated women.”13
In the presidential election of 1916, Kennedy cast a heartfelt vote for Woodrow Wilson, whose campaign slogan was both a boast and a promise: “He kept us out of war!” The rallying cry worked, and Wilson was narrowly reelected. But the promise proved short-lived. Long convinced that the United States could no longer isolate itself from international power politics, Wilson believed that he alone occupied the best position to mediate a fair settlement and stop the bloodshed. At the same time, he feared that only if the United States became a belligerent could he be assured of a seat at the negotiating table.14 He was still grappling with this dilemma when Germany, in a desperate bid to upset the military balance, commenced total submarine warfare on February 17, 1917. All ships in war zones were now fair game. Two days later, Wilson broke off diplomatic relations with Berlin.
When war came two months later, Kennedy expressed no enthusiasm. The surge of patriotic fervor that even many former opponents of intervention experienced eluded him. Unlike most of his Harvard friends, Kennedy did not enlist, but on June 5, one week after John’s birth, he reported to his local polling place and completed his registration card. It soon became clear that he would get no exemption for marriage or fatherhood, but an “industrial exemption” might be possible, provided he had a job that qualified. In September 1917, Joe jumped at the offer to become assistant general manager of the Fore River Shipyard, in Quincy, ten miles south of Boston, which had been contracted to produce destroyers for the war effort.15
A happy Jack at approximately six months, in fall 1917.
Kennedy knew little about shipbuilding, but he was a quick study and nothing if not industrious, frequently putting in seventy-hour workweeks and often sleeping in his office. Colleagues marveled at his stamina, and Rose and the family seldom saw him except on Sundays. When, to his astonishment, his draft board in February 1918 informed him he had been classified Class 1 and might be called for military service, Kennedy appealed immediately for a deferment “on industrial grounds” and included with his appeal a lengthy letter in which he laid out his responsibilities at Fore River.16 His superiors vouched for him, and the effort worked. He never received a deferment, but neither was he called for the draft, and he remained at Fore River till the end of the war.
That end came sooner than many anticipated, and the American contribution was considerable. Allied victory in the Second Battle of the Marne, northeast of Paris, in July 1918 stopped all German advances, and in the massive Meuse-Argonne offensive that followed, more than a million American soldiers joined French and British units in six weeks of ferocious combat along much of the Western Front, beginning with a U.S. strike northward tow
ard Sedan on September 26. More than 26,000 Americans died in the ensuing struggle, and another hundred thousand were wounded—making it the bloodiest campaign in American history to this day—before the Allies gained the upper hand. For Germany, there was no escape. Its submarine war and ground operations had been stymied, its exhausted troops and cities were mutinous, and the kaiser had abdicated. Allied Austria and Turkey were giving up the fight. The Entente powers, meanwhile, had the luxury of endless American troop reinforcements and arms shipments. Peace became essential, and the Germans accepted an exacting armistice. It went into effect on the morning of November 11, 1918, at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month.17
No one can fully calculate the costs of the war, but the magnitude is clear enough: the belligerents counted some ten million soldiers and a roughly equal number of civilians dead and twenty million people wounded, eight million of them permanently disabled. Fifty-three thousand U.S. soldiers perished in battle. The economic damage was immense as well, which helps to explain the pervasive starvation Europe endured in the winter of 1918–19. Economic activity on much of the Continent withered, and transport over meaningful distances was in some countries almost impossible. The German, Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, and Russian empires disappeared, and for a time it seemed the Bolshevik Revolution would spread westward into the heart of a weak and weary Europe. “We are at the dead season of our fortunes,” wrote one young British observer, the economist John Maynard Keynes. “Never in the lifetime of men now living has the universal element in the soul of man burnt so dimly.”18
II
For the Kennedys, as for many other Americans, the final months of the war had been a blur as they grappled with a more immediate menace: the influenza pandemic that swept the earth in the summer and fall of 1918 and would kill more than twice as many as the Great War itself—somewhere between fifty and a hundred million people. In the United States, nearly 700,000 people died. (Among U.S. soldiers in Europe, the disease claimed more lives—63,000—than did the fighting.) It was an illness like no other. People could be healthy on Monday and dead by Wednesday evening. Some died quickly, experiencing a rapid accumulation of fluid in the lungs that caused them to literally drown. Others lingered before succumbing to secondary bacterial infection. Mortality rates were highest for those in their twenties and thirties.19
The first cases were identified in the American Midwest in the late winter of 1918, and some of the soldiers shipping out to Europe in large numbers unknowingly carried the virus in their lungs. The disease appeared on the Western Front in April, then made its way to Spain, where it killed so many people—some eight million—that it became known as the Spanish flu. There followed a midsummer lull, after which a second, deadlier form of the illness began spreading to various points of the globe, and in September the disease rampaged down the East Coast of the United States, from Boston to New York to Baltimore and beyond. That month, more than twelve thousand Americans perished.
Joe Kennedy was given the task of managing the impact of the crisis at Fore River. With scores of the company’s workers falling ill, he converted shipyard dormitories into infirmaries, hoping to isolate the ailing and prevent further contagion. He stayed put in Quincy for days on end, no doubt partly in order to avoid the risk of contaminating his family. In addition to Rose, Joe Junior, and John, there was now also Rose Marie (later Rosemary, or, to the family, Rosie), born on September 13. “She was,” Rose recalled, “a very pretty baby and she was sweet and peaceable and cried less than the first two had, which at the time I supposed was part of her being a girl.” A clipping in Rose’s scrapbook included the line “A brilliant future is predicted for the baby.”20
In October, the pandemic reached maximum ferocity, hitting almost every corner of the world. In the United States that month, 200,000 perished. Then suddenly, in November, for reasons that remain murky, the crisis eased, and by early 1919 the pandemic was over. With India alone suffering as many as seventeen million deaths, and Samoa losing more than a fifth of its population, it was, in historian Roy Porter’s words, “the greatest single demographic shock mankind has ever experienced.”21 The war was partly responsible for spreading the disease, but so were advances in shipbuilding that for several decades had facilitated global travel and made the world smaller.
The Kennedys survived the epidemic intact, but the long hours and the stress took their toll on Joe, who developed an ulcer and suffered a physical breakdown in late 1918, requiring several weeks of recuperation at a “health farm.” For Rose the absence was not much of a change, for her husband hadn’t been around much during his years at Fore River. Even before that—indeed, from the beginning of their marriage—he had worked brutally long hours at Columbia Trust, including on weekends. Usually he came home at night, but not always. On those occasions, Rose did not question where he had been—or why. “Joe’s time was his own,” she remarked in her memoirs, “as it had been and always would be: School and college had once taken much of it before, and now it was business.”22
Only business? Rose was too discreet to say, but the careful words suggest she had some inkling of what she was getting when she married him, knew there was an area of his life that she would not be a part of, a compartment she could not enter. Of their pre-marriage days, biographer David Nasaw writes, “At Harvard and after graduation, Joe remained faithful to Rose in the way that men of his generation and class remained faithful to their best girls. He did not court any other marriageable women, but neither did he remain chaste until his wedding day.” Afterwards, it seems, the pattern continued. Which is to say, Joe did not give up being a womanizer. He had affairs, lots of them, with secretaries, stenographers, waitresses, actresses, and others.23 How much this surprised his wife—if it did at all—we don’t know. She was well aware that her father had been untrue to her mother, and that many of the other politicians and celebrities she met during her years as Honey Fitz’s hostess and sidekick had likewise cheated on their wives. Even so, and even though she was highly adept at suppressing or ignoring things that made her unhappy (and certainly did not record them for posterity), it can’t have been easy on those occasions when evening came and no husband appeared.
The sheer quietude of those evenings, even when Joe was home, was undoubtedly a shock to Rose’s system. No longer was she the belle of Catholic Boston, written about in the press, attending balls, traveling internationally, meeting famous people, appearing alongside her effervescent father at this or that lavish banquet or campaign rally or ship launching, or in a box on opening night at the theater. She’d loved that life, and even though marriage and domesticity brought their own pleasures, it’s hard to imagine that a wave of nostalgia did not wash over her from time to time. Her new existence gave her scant opportunity to exercise her formidable and capacious intelligence, her passion for politics, and her wide-ranging curiosity about the world.24
All around her she could see the gains that women were experiencing in American society. In August 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment gave women the right to vote, and though they remained excluded from local and national political realms, they found increased opportunities for making their voices heard through a plethora of civic, religious, and voluntary groups and clubs.25 More women were entering the job force as well, albeit in positions men seldom sought—nursing, teaching, and clerical work. Fashions were changing as new fabrics and dyes allowed for more self-expression and less restrictive cuts. Hemlines moved up and necklines crept lower. Corsets went in the trash or in a box in the attic. The boundaries between appropriate and unacceptable behavior for women blurred as drinking, smoking, and frankness about sex became fashionable. Whereas in 1915 most middle- and upper-class young women had to be chaperoned during social engagements, by a decade later they engaged in unsupervised dating, in which a fellow “asked out” a woman and spent money on her. Rose gave little overt indication that she longed for full access to this n
ew world—it conflicted in key respects with the conservative version of Catholic womanhood to which she and her mother adhered—but in a moment of candor she acknowledged that “life was flowing past.”26
Only once that we know of was there a seeming rupture. The details are sketchy, but according to relatives, in early 1920, heavily pregnant with her fourth child—Kathleen would be born on February 20—Rose abruptly moved back to her parents’ home on Welles Avenue in Dorchester. Joe’s constant work and frequent absences were too much, the emotional deprivation too draining. Even when Joe was home, a part of him was not really there, as he refused to talk about work and no longer shared his dreams or plans with her, as he had done during the many years of courtship. She felt isolated, she told her parents, and ached for more. Honey Fitz and Josie had long had their doubts about their son-in-law and his ruthless ambition, but they were not thrilled by the new arrangement. After three weeks, Honey Fitz told his daughter that, in so many words, she had made her bed and must lie in it. The kids needed her, and so did her husband. “You’ve made your commitment, Rosie,” he told her, “and you must honor it now. What is past is past. The old days are gone. [But] you can make things work out. I know you can.”27
Rose complied and, after attending a church retreat, returned to Beals Street, determined to fulfill her duties as wife and mother. If her subsequent unambiguous defense of the marriage in this period—“[You] never heard a cross word, we always understood one another and trusted one another and that was it”—doesn’t exactly have the ring of truth, it’s almost certainly the case that Rose gave little thought to divorce. Her deep Catholic faith proscribed it. Moreover, church teachings provided a measure of comfort, instructing her that all spouses faced pressures, especially in child-rearing, and that there was true nobility in marital sacrifices.28
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