III
And indeed, there were plenty of good times in these years, too. Often on Saturday evenings, Joe and Rose would attend the symphony in Boston. At Harvard he had developed a deep interest in classical music, and she had studied composition and performance during her school year in Holland. They relished taking in live concerts as well as playing records at home on the family Victrola. At other times Rose would sit down at the piano in the living room and play popular songs, with Joe and the children or family friends joining in with the words. On Sundays they piled the kids into the family Model T and drove the ten miles to Winthrop to visit Joe’s parents. And on weekday mornings, Rose took pleasure in taking the children on excursions in the neighborhood, pulling Rosemary in a kiddie car and holding little Jack (as they called him) by the hand while Joe Junior walked alongside.29 They would stop in a store or two—the five-and-ten in Coolidge Corner was particularly exciting for the boys—and at St. Aidan’s Church, on Freeman Street, to instill in the children the idea, she later said, that “church isn’t just for Sundays and special times on the calendar but should be part of daily life.”30
And so it was. Rose insisted that her children observe the important Catholic rituals, starting with baptism in the days after birth and then, as they grew, First Confession, First Holy Communion, and Confirmation. Before and after meals and before bed, she guided them in prayer. She made sure they never traveled without a rosary in their pocket. Every Sunday, without fail, and on First Fridays, the family attended Mass, and they were in the pews as well on the Holy Days of Obligation—the Epiphany on January 6, the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary on August 15, All Saints’ Day on November 1, and so on. The boys served as altar boys, and the girls wore veils and carried prayer books.31
Joe, meanwhile, could show his tender side, surprising Rose with flowers or a loving note. At the birth of each child, he gave her a thoughtful, often expensive gift. And whenever a child became ill, this workaholic father would become instantly engaged. Jack’s fragile health was a special concern. His birth, in May 1917, had been uncomplicated—Dr. Frederick L. Good, a Boston obstetrician who was summoned along with his nurse to the Kennedy home for the delivery (he would deliver each of the Kennedy children, and a few of the grandchildren after that), pronounced the baby healthy and handsome. But from an early point, little Jack was sickly and frail. Rose tried hard to build up his strength, to no avail. In February 1920, at age two years, nine months, he contracted scarlet fever, mere days after Kathleen’s birth. A leading cause of childhood death in those years, the illness also could have serious aftereffects (kidney disease, rheumatic heart disease, arthritis), and it was highly contagious, a potential disaster in the tight confines of a family home. With the local Brookline hospital refusing to take patients with contagious illnesses, Kennedy enlisted his father’s and his father-in-law’s help to get little Jack admitted to Boston City Hospital, even though he was not a Boston resident.
“By the time he got there,” Rose remembered, “Jack was a very, very sick little boy.” Unable to visit him because she was adhering to the custom of the day to remain in bed for three weeks after childbirth, Rose dispatched Joe, who for two months changed his schedule so he could spend each afternoon and evening at his son’s hospital bedside.32 The situation was acute, and Joe feared the worst. For several agonizing days, Jack hovered between life and death. But eventually he pulled through, aided in no small part by the treatment he received from the attending physician, Dr. Edward Place, widely acknowledged as the nation’s leading authority on measles and scarlet fever. In early July, Joe penned a heartfelt note of thanks to Dr. Place, “for your wonderful work for Jack during his recent illness.” He added that he had “never experienced any serious sickness in my family previous to this case of Jack’s, and I little realized what an effect such a happening could possibly have on me. During the darkest days I felt that nothing else mattered except his recovery.”33
At one point during the harrowing episode, Kennedy pledged—to God, or to himself, or both—that if Jack lived, he would give half of his fortune to the Church. When his son did recover, he wrote a check for $3,740, half of his liquid assets (on paper he was worth infinitely more), to the Guild of Saint Appollonia, which had been formed a decade before to provide free dental care to the city’s Catholic schoolchildren. Jack, for his part, so endeared himself to the nurses with his sweetness and vulnerability that two of them would later pay him a visit at home. “He is such a wonderful boy,” nurse Sara Miller wrote in a letter to Joe. “We all love him very much.” Nurse Anna Pope agreed some weeks later: “Jack is certainly the nicest little boy I have ever seen….I’m afraid I asked for too much when I asked for Jack’s picture but he was so lovable and such an excellent little patient, everyone loved him. I felt very lonesome when I left him.” Upon being discharged, Jack was sent away for several weeks of convalescence at the Mansion House Hotel, in Poland Springs, Maine, as there was worry he might still be contagious. Only in May, three months after falling ill and near his third birthday, did he return home to Brookline. His nurse reported that he had been “an excellent little patient” and that, after meeting his baby sister at last, he appeared “very happy.”34
By this stage the Kennedys were on the move. The previous year, Joe had taken a management position with Hayden, Stone and Company, a leading stockbrokerage firm with offices in Boston and New York. From the start, he thrived, learning market operations and the intricacies of insider trading (not then illegal, but widely considered unethical) from Galen Stone, the portly and mustached co-founder, who became his mentor. With his zest for hard work and his skill at juggling numbers and accounts, Kennedy did well for the company and for himself, investing in stocks on the side and buying and selling real estate, all the while expanding his connections in the financial world. In one case, he learned from Stone that the Pond Creek Coal Company, whose board of directors Stone chaired, was about to be acquired by Henry Ford. Before the plan was made public, Joe bought fifteen thousand shares at $16, mostly with borrowed funds; when news of Ford’s plans broke, Pond Creek skyrocketed, and Kennedy promptly sold, netting more than half a million dollars.35
As socially ambitious as ever, Kennedy dressed for success, ordering tailored suits and custom-made shirts, and he joined first the Woodland Golf Club and then the Middlesex Club, the oldest Republican club in New England (though he kept his Democratic affiliation). And he moved his family to a new Brookline home, at 131 Naples Road.36 The anticipated further expansion of his family made a change of address imperative, but it mattered as well that the new residence was in a fancier neighborhood, with grander houses on bigger plots, more suitable for a man of his station. This home, for which he paid $16,000, sat on an acre, had twelve rooms, high ceilings, a formal entry, curved bay windows, plus an icebox and a washing machine. The Beals Street house they sold to Joe’s loyal assistant and confidant Edward “Eddie” Moore and his wife, Mary, who, with no children of their own, became fixtures at Naples Road, chipping in to help as needed, including as babysitters to the ever-growing brood of Kennedy children.
Rose was delighted with the relocation. She loved the splendor of the new residence, reminiscent as it was of what she had had as a teenager in Dorchester, yet it was close enough to Beals Street that she still knew her way about the neighborhood. Most of all, it had the space her growing family needed. She turned the large wraparound front porch into a playroom, separating the children with folding partitions—“two, three or four of them as the situation at the time indicated. That way they could be with each other and entertain one another for hours at a time with a minimal risk that they would push one another down or stick one another with something sharp or perhaps pile heavy objects inside or on top of the baby carriage.”37 Soon pregnant again, she delivered Eunice in July 1921. Patricia followed in May 1924, and then Robert in November 1925, Jean in February 1928, and finally Edward (named for Eddi
e Moore) in February 1932.
To manage her ever-expanding family, Rose relied not merely on full-time domestic help but on a detailed cataloging system in which she kept index cards and index tabs listing illnesses, treatments, and measurements for each child. She became an “executive,” as she herself put it, overseeing the kids’ clothes and their daily exercise and managing a complex operation of maids, nurses, and cooks:
I had to be sure there were plenty of good-quality diapers on hand, and that they were changed as needed and properly washed and stored for us….There was also the daily supply of bottles and nipples to be cleaned and sterilized. I didn’t do much of it myself, but I had to make sure it was done properly, and on a schedule that didn’t interfere with another vital schedule. If nursemaids were in the kitchen boiling bottles and nipples and preparing “formulas” and pureeing vegetables (there were no canned baby foods then) when the cook needed the stove and some of the same utensils to prepare supper, there could be a kitchen crisis, sharp words and bruised feelings and, from a management point of view, a precipitous drop in morale and efficiency.38
In later years Rose would be faulted for what some saw as a severe and overly clinical approach to child-rearing, one focused on “efficiency” and order rather than on love and affection. It’s true that she doled out hugs and kisses sparingly, and placed a premium on presentation—proper attire, proper grammar, proper posture. She obsessed about the children’s weight, especially the girls’. It may be, as some have suggested, that she dealt with her husband’s philandering by isolating herself emotionally from her family—and, in part, physically as well, through frequent traveling vacations without her husband and children. Five-year-old Jack’s memorable rebuke, when his mother prepared to depart for a six-week trip to California with her sister Agnes, is telling: “Gee, you’re a great mother to go away and leave your children all alone!”39
Telling behavior—but only to a degree. It bears noting that Rose herself was the source for Jack’s comment, in her diary entry for April 3, 1923, and also that she used it to underscore the young boy’s wit and precociousness. In her memoirs, moreover, she acknowledged that Jack’s comment wounded her, and that she felt miserable the next day as the kids gathered on the porch to see her off. “They looked so forlorn, and when I kissed them good-bye I had tears in my eyes,” she wrote. But then: “After I was down the street a way I suddenly realized there was something I had forgotten and I came back—to find them all laughing and playing on the porch, apparently not missing me much at all. I resumed my journey with an easy conscience.”40
To some extent, at least, an “executive” approach to her task was necessitated by her circumstances. She had five children in six years, from 1915 to 1921, and two more by the end of 1925, with two more still to come after that. Oldest daughter Rosemary, moreover, showed signs of being slow to develop and required extra attention. Rose was effectively a single parent most of the time, as her husband’s work not only kept him in the office until all hours but took him out of town for days, even weeks, on end. The family finances allowed her to have much more domestic help than most mothers of the era—as she herself readily acknowledged—but even so, the logistical demands were extraordinary, especially given her commitment to the then-current ideal of achievement-oriented child-rearing. The right kind of mothering, this Victorian notion held, could set a child on a lifelong path of personal and social significance. From this ideal flowed movements like Republican Motherhood, centered in New England and urging women to be highly engaged with their offspring and to raise patriotic sons who would enter public service.41
Even Rose’s practice of withholding physical affection from her children, so jarring to our modern sensibility and no doubt to many parents at the time, had expert support behind it. With her characteristic hunger for learning, Rose avidly studied the “scientific” child-rearing recommendations of the era and tried to follow them. Eleanor Roosevelt and countless other women did the same. L. Emmett Holt’s bestselling study The Care and Feeding of Children: A Catechism for the Use of Mothers and Children’s Nurses, which made him a kind of Dr. Spock figure of his day, warned mothers against coddling children or playing with them or displaying a lot of affection toward them. Babies, he wrote, should be kissed only on the cheek or forehead, “but the less even of this the better.” Feeding and sleeping schedules should be highly regimented, and children ought to be weighed at standardized intervals. (The data should be collected on, yes, index cards.) They should also get plenty of fresh air and exercise. Rose followed each of these recommendations, and she took to heart as well Holt’s emphasis on dental hygiene. Healthy teeth were imperative to good health and good looks, he declared, and mothers should not fall into the trap of thinking they could delay proper dental care for their offspring. Rose hired an orthodontist to straighten out the children’s teeth, and she insisted on toothbrushings after every meal.42
It wasn’t just Holt. A survey of magazine articles focusing on motherhood between 1910 and 1935 found that the writers considered “too much love” to be the greatest threat to a child’s welfare. And John B. Watson, in his influential book The Psychological Care of Infant and Child (1928), built on Holt’s theories to argue for a stern, controlling, discipline-centered parenting style and to warn against too much maternal affection toward the children. Kissing and hugging, he noted, should be avoided to the greatest extent possible. “If you must, kiss them once on the forehead when they say good night. Shake hands with them in the morning.”43
IV
With a live-in staff that freed her from some of the basic caregiving for the younger children, Rose could focus her attention on the intellectual and social development of the older ones. In addition to outings to points of interest in Brookline, including the public library on Washington Street, she took them on regular visits to see Boston’s historic sites, much as Honey Fitz had done with her when she was little. (Often she would rattle off improvised math challenges en route: “What is two plus two, subtract three, then add two?”) Rose was adamant that “they should know history and especially the history of their own country,” and on their excursions to landmarks she would explain what had happened at the spot and why it mattered, encouraging questions and discussion so the kids would remember. “I was determined about this, and I may have overdone it a little since there can be too much even of a good thing,” she recalled. “In any case they did learn, their interest developed with the years, and I suspect that this may be one reason why as adults they wanted to serve the country in public life.”44
Jack in particular seemed to be fascinated by history, and by the world generally. His curiosity was insatiable. Rose noticed it during these day trips, and also when she read to him in the evenings. He loved adventure stories of all kinds—Sinbad the Sailor, Black Beauty, Peter Pan—and was especially fond of Billy Whiskers, a picture book series by Frances Trego Montgomery featuring a mischievous goat that marries and has two “kids.” Rose found the illustrations crude and harsh, but Jack adored the tales. When he learned in one story that Billy stopped in the Sandwich Islands on his way across the Pacific, Jack asked his mother to get information on this mysterious-sounding place, which she duly did, pulling out the family atlas so Jack could see for himself. Another time, when she read to the older children the Easter story of Christ’s entrance into Jerusalem on a donkey, shortly before the Crucifixion and Resurrection, Jack piped up: “Mother, we know what happened to Jesus Christ, but what happened to the donkey?”45
With his quick wit and irreverent spirit, Jack resembled his maternal grandfather, Honey Fitz, which may explain why the two got on so well. A frequent visitor in these years, “Grandpa Fitz” would take the two older boys for hours at a time, to a sporting event or to the swan boats in the Public Garden, or to the State House where he had formerly been a senator. The boys loved his sense of fun, his infectious love of learning, his sheer delight at being in th
eir presence. (By contrast, their other grandfather, P. J. Kennedy, “wouldn’t let us cut up or even wink in his presence,” Jack remembered.) They never tired of hearing the old man’s well-worn stories, listening with rapt attention and pleading, “Tell that one again, Grandpa!”46
Rose with her five children, circa 1922. From left: Eunice, Rosemary (in foreground), Kathleen, Jack, and Joe Junior.
The fifty-nine-year-old Fitzgerald had ample time for his grandsons because his once-storied political career had sputtered. In 1916, two years after the Toodles scandal forced his withdrawal from the mayor’s race, he’d won the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate, but he was defeated in the general election by Republican Henry Cabot Lodge. In 1918 he rebounded to claim a seat in Congress, representing the Tenth District, only to be forced out after seven months when a congressional investigation found evidence of voter fraud. Yearning for one more shot at the limelight, Honey Fitz announced in 1922 that he would challenge Lodge a second time for the Senate, then abruptly switched his candidacy to the race for governor. One of Jack Kennedy’s earliest memories was touring the Boston wards with his grandfather, who invariably let loose his patented rendition of “Sweet Adeline” and chatted up anyone and everyone. The crowds loved him, but it was not enough: Honey Fitz lost by a wide margin. His political peak had passed.47
Jack remained frail and prone to sickness, in contrast to his robust and physically imposing older brother. But he did well enough academically at the local Edward Devotion School to enter second grade (under Miss Bicknell) at age six, a year ahead of most kids his age. And he had charm in abundance, not to mention a taste for mischief. Admonished by his mother to get serious in school, he breezily replied, “You know, I’m getting on all right, and if you study too much, you’re liable to go crazy.” That same fall, 1923, Jack and Joe Junior were caught shoplifting false mustaches from a shop, this after they formed a club in which they initiated new members by sticking pins into them. On an eatery sign reading “No dogs allowed in this Restaurant,” they scribbled “Hot” before “dogs.” On another occasion in 1923, soon after a family vacation, Jack confessed to his father, “Well, here I have been home only a few hours and the cops are chasing me already.” He had teased a little girl who had promptly gone to tell a policeman on him, whereupon Jack had raced home and hidden in the cellar until nightfall.48
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