It was all standard high jinks for two energetic youngsters, but for the family “executive,” Rose Kennedy, it suggested the need for a more structured environment. The point was brought home when Joe Junior cajoled Jack into racing around the block on their bikes in opposite directions and a collision occurred, sending Jack to the hospital for twenty-eight stitches. Another time she caught the two boys in the cellar, surrounded by empty milk bottles they had purloined from the neighborhood in order to resell. She opted to transfer them from Edward Devotion School to the private Noble and Greenough Lower School (soon thereafter renamed Dexter), six blocks from home, which fielded sports teams and where “there would be after-school supervised play” until 4:45 in the afternoon.49
The principal of the school, Miss Myra Fiske, had interviewed the boys in the spring of 1924 and liked what she saw. She noted Jack’s precocious intellect and wrote that she was “very glad that we decided to take this little John Kennedy. He is a fine chap.” That fall the brothers enrolled and instantly entered an elite world, a Brahmin bastion where Catholics were rare and blacks and Jews unknown. “We were probably the first and only ones who were Catholics,” Jack later reflected, which may have been an exaggeration but not by much.50
A well-groomed Jack in his Dexter School picture in 1925.
Inevitably, the taunting and bullying soon followed. “Almost everybody was a Protestant,” schoolmate Augustus Soule recalled. “I think there was a sort of snobbery, which the children adopted. I think that in those days the upper crust Boston families, of which there were a great number sending their children to the school, were very down on the Irish….To be Irish and Catholic was a real, real stigma—and when the other boys got mad at the Kennedys, they would resort to calling them Irish or Catholic.” Sometimes the fists started flying. Joe, older and bigger than his brother, not to mention more pugnacious and combative, seemed to take the encounters in stride, even challenging older boys to fight on occasion. Jack took a different tack, betting on his brother to win the scraps using a popular schoolyard currency. Soule again:
In those days, marbles: that was the big thing. You always carried a little bag of marbles in your pants pocket. And I can remember going back to my father and saying, “I need some more marbles.”
“What happened to the ones you had?” he’d ask.
“Well, I lost them all in a bet.”
“With whom?”
“I bet with Jack Kennedy.”
It’s an indelible memory I have: Joe fighting and getting all bloody, and Jack going around, betting marbles very quietly. To my mind that illustrates how completely different the two brothers were!51
For all the ostracism they suffered, however, both Joe and Jack liked the school. They played sports and eventually earned starting slots on the football team, with Joe as a bruising fullback and Jack as the lithe and scrappy quarterback.52 They had dedicated and able teachers. Miss Fiske, much beloved by the students, would gather them all together for assembly each morning, and they would recite in unison the school motto (“Our best today, better tomorrow”), followed by Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address or his second inaugural address, or a passage from literature or the Bible.53
With his lively wit and natural interest in history, Jack became Miss Fiske’s special pet. One day he asked her to take him to the historic sites of Lexington and Concord, and offered to get his father’s Rolls-Royce for the occasion. “I don’t think Rose came,” Fiske recalled many years later. “All the boys turned out to see the famous Rolls-Royce. And when it came it was a dilapidated old Ford! Jack never got over how the other boys hooted him—something had happened to the Rolls-Royce!”54
V
That Jack could even offer the luxury automobile for an after-school excursion says something about the family’s finances at mid-decade. In actuality, Joseph P. Kennedy owned not one Rolls but two, and his fortune was growing by the day. After leaving Hayden, Stone at the start of 1923 (though highly successful at the firm, he felt certain, no doubt rightly, that as an Irish Catholic he would never make partner), he had struck out on his own, down the hall from his old firm, on Milk Street in Boston’s financial district, behind a door marked “Joseph P. Kennedy, Banker.” At thirty-four, he was in business for himself, with only Eddie Moore, his genial and devoted factotum, and accountant E. B. Derr on his staff. “It’s so easy to make money in this market,” Kennedy told a Harvard friend. “We’d better get it before they pass a law against it.”55
Telegram to “Captain Jack Kennedy” from his father, May 19, 1926, prior to a Dexter football game. The message reads: “Dear Jack, good luck to the team in your game with Rivers this afternoon, and hope you all play well. Daddy.”
And so he did. His timing was exquisite, as the economy was emerging full-force out of the postwar doldrums. Farmers struggled and would do so through the end of the decade, but the automobile industry zoomed ahead and the manufacturing sector gained enormously from new technologies—electric motors, aluminum, synthetic materials—that allowed for a proliferation of new consumer goods. The expansion of the economy also gave Americans more discretionary income to spend on the new appliances, as well as on restaurant meals, beauty products, and movies. By the late 1920s, the United States produced nearly half of the world’s industrial goods and ranked first among exporters—by 1929, it was responsible for nearly one-sixth of global exports. One in every five Americans now had a car. More and more American companies were looking abroad, with General Electric and Coca-Cola, for example, investing heavily in Germany and with several U.S. firms challenging British companies for control of Middle East petroleum.56
To a degree fully evident only after the fact, the Great War had altered the global power balance as the United States challenged a prostrate and divided Europe for world leadership. During the course of the war, financial predominance had crossed the Atlantic from London to New York as Europe’s international debts skyrocketed and the United States became the world’s largest creditor nation. By the time the shooting stopped, America’s gross domestic product was equal to that of all the European states together. Old World leaders took due notice, and oriented themselves to the prospect of a new American-led global order. In the geopolitical arena, however, Washington punched below its weight, and the postwar peacemaking effort proved difficult—the bitter and protracted battle between Woodrow Wilson and his domestic opponents resulted in the Senate’s rejecting American membership in the newly founded League of Nations. The result preserved the notion (artificial, it would turn out) of a Euro-centered world, and cheered those—like Joseph Kennedy—who wanted the United States to stay out of foreign political entanglements, out of fear that they would encroach on American sovereignty and threaten its way of life. Even many of those who wanted U.S. membership in the League took the defeat in stride, seeing it as a minor bump on the road to growth and prosperity.57
Wall Street reflected the growing popular optimism, though the boom market was still some years off when Joseph Kennedy established his business. Under Galen Stone’s tutelage, he had learned to use inside information to minimize risk and maximize return; with his lack of sentiment and skill with numbers, he became savvy at market schemes that, while then still legal, were considered by many to be disreputable. A favorite tactic was the stock pool, in which a few traders banded together to buy shares of inactive stock and trade them back and forth to create the appearance of a boom and thus draw in less adroit investors. At an agreed-upon top price, the pool would “pull the plug” and leave the duped investors holding the bag as the stock sank back to its real market value. An elaboration of the maneuver added the option of short selling the stock on its way down.58
Decades later, after his sons became prominent political figures, critics would charge that much of Joe Kennedy’s investment capital during the 1920s came from bootlegging operations undertaken with mob f
igures in what was, after all, an era of Prohibition. (The Eighteenth Amendment, ratified by the states in 1919 and put into effect the following year, prohibited the manufacturing, transportation, and sale of alcohol within the United States.59) No solid evidence ever accompanied these claims, and careful research by Daniel Okrent and David Nasaw has failed to turn up any.*3 Moreover, as Nasaw notes, the notion of Kennedy as bootlegger runs contrary to what we know about the man. He always moved cautiously in his business affairs, always placed a premium on achieving and maintaining the appearance of respectability. As an Irish Catholic outsider in the WASP financial world, he understood all too well that his opponents were watching him closely, hoping he would trip up; he needed to watch his every step. Though not averse to playing at the margins of legality, or to taking financial risks when the situation warranted, he took care not to cross over into unlawful territory—he had too much to lose.60
By the end of 1925, Joseph P. Kennedy was a millionaire several times over. A vow he had made upon graduating from university—that he would make his first million by thirty-five—had been realized and surpassed.61
Yet he was dissatisfied. Almost on a daily basis, he received reminders that he and his family would never be fully accepted among “proper Bostonians”—even if in material terms he had long since left his patrician Harvard friends in his wake. He saw it in the treatment his boys received at school, in the barriers that would keep his daughters from being invited to the right debutante parties when they came of age, in the glass ceiling he had come up against at Hayden, Stone. When he rented a summerhouse for the family above a rock-studded beach in Cohasset, fifteen miles southeast of Boston, he found pointed evidence of Brahmin prejudice. Many of Boston’s elite families passed the summers there, and made it clear they wanted nothing to do with the Irish American newcomers. The community’s matrons snubbed Rose, and Joe was blackballed when he applied for membership in the Cohasset Country Club.62
A different man would have brushed aside the disappointments, secure in the knowledge that they paled next to his extraordinary financial accomplishments and his large and handsome family. But Joe Kennedy could never rationalize things that way. His pride wouldn’t let him. Beneath his proud and bullish bravado was a deeply insecure man, whose sense of self-worth was so intimately connected to success that even minor defeats or rejections—the social slights at Harvard, the country-club snubs—left deep and lasting wounds. It didn’t matter how many triumphs he achieved along the way. “Goddamn it! I was born here,” he exclaimed in an interview, referring to Boston, his frustration rising with each word. “My children were born here. What the hell do I have to do to be an American?”63
He wanted out: wanted out of Boston’s constrictive social environment, wanted to move the family to a more open and meritocratic place, a place where he was spending more and more of his time anyway—namely, New York City. Boston was “no place to bring up Catholic children,” he later said. Perhaps not, but his very Catholic wife frowned at the idea. Rose Kennedy had moved schools several times as a child herself and had found the experience difficult; she didn’t want the same thing for her kids. And Boston was her town. She cherished its rich history, its status as the cradle of the American Revolution, and she knew her way around its landmarks as few others did. But her husband persisted, and it was her habit to defer to him on matters of consequence. (“The architect of our lives,” she revealingly called him.) She found herself softening. She realized she liked Manhattan on her visits there to see Joe, and enjoyed the Broadway shows they took in. When an outbreak of poliomyelitis—the same disease that crippled Franklin Roosevelt in 1921—broke out in Massachusetts in September 1927, and the Dexter School announced it would not reopen before October, Rose took it as a sign and relented: New York it would be.64
On September 27, 1927, the Kennedy family, numbering nine strong and traveling in a specially hired railway car, made its way south to Riverdale, a leafy part of the Bronx overlooking the Hudson River. There they settled in a rented stucco house at the corner of Independence Avenue and 252nd Street. Not far away stood the Wave Hill estate, once lived in by both Mark Twain and Theodore Roosevelt. Rose had advocated for Riverdale because it resembled Brookline in key respects: a suburb with excellent schools that were within walking distance of home. On September 28, the day after their arrival, the school-age kids enrolled at the private, nonsectarian Riverdale Country School.65
VI
Perhaps Rose Kennedy had one additional motivation in agreeing to the move: she hoped she and the children would see more of Joe, who was increasingly ensconced in the New York financial world. It was not to be. Barely had they settled in when her husband began spending much of his time in Hollywood, to pursue a growing side business in the movies. Years before, while still president of Columbia Trust, Kennedy had remarked to an associate, “We must get into the picture business. This is a new industry and a gold mine.” By early 1920, while at Hayden, Stone, he’d had a hand in a variety of production and distribution efforts, and in short order had gained control of a chain of thirty-one New England theaters. His timing, again, was superb: in total capital investment, the motion picture industry was fast becoming one of the nation’s largest. Some twenty thousand theaters dotted the country, ranging from the modest small-town venue with a hundred seats to the luxurious urban “picture palaces,” with their baroque lobbies and a thousand or more padded seats. In 1922, movies drew some forty million viewers weekly; by 1929 the number approached a hundred million—this at a time when the nation’s population was 122 million and weekly church attendance was sixty million.66
Yet it struck Kennedy that it was a poorly run industry, anarchic and wasteful and lacking a structure, and tailor-made for someone like him, with an eye for numbers and for profits. In 1926 he bought a struggling company called Film Booking Offices and was soon churning out highly profitable Hollywood potboilers at the rate of two or three per month. Artistic distinction mattered not a whit—Kennedy’s sole concern, as producer, was whether the film would make money. Westerns and melodramas predominated, with titles such as The Dude Cowboy and Red Hot Hooves, featuring no-name actors or over-the-hill stars. (He also tried in vain to sign baseball star Babe Ruth.) Budgets seldom exceeded $30,000.67
As he had with the Boston Brahmins, Kennedy expressed private contempt for Hollywood elites while at the same time compulsively seeking their acceptance. In early 1927, he hit upon the idea of bringing the top studio heads to Harvard for a lecture series on the film industry. The dean of the business school signed off, as did President A. Lawrence Lowell, and the invitations went out. Though many of the tycoons were not on speaking terms—a few were even suing each other—the prestige of speaking at the nation’s leading university won them over, just as Kennedy had predicted. One after another they accepted the invitation and soon began descending on the campus, barely able to hide their awed enthusiasm. “I cannot begin to tell you how it impresses me, coming to a great college such as this to deliver a lecture, when I have never even seen the inside of one before,” gushed an emotional Marcus Loew. Other giants, including Alfred Zukor and Harry Warner, spoke in similar terms. For Kennedy the endeavor was a smashing personal success that secured his standing as a leading new fixture on the Hollywood scene.68
Rose was aware, in broad outline, of Joe’s film work (to the delight of the Kennedy children and their stupefied friends, he would screen first-run motion pictures from a projector set up in the family living room), and she assumed he would run his growing empire from New York City. And indeed, Kennedy maintained the main FBO office at 1560 Broadway, off Forty-sixth Street, in Manhattan. But more often than not he was out west, sometimes for weeks at a time. And not just for business. “In those days,” film writer Cy Howard would later observe,
Hollywood was the perfect place for an Eastern banker to have an affair. Separated from the East Coast by three days on a train, there w
as little worry of the accidental encounter between a wife and a mistress in a restaurant or on a street corner. Beyond that, there was the nature of the film industry, which provided dozens of Hollywood producers just like Joe with the perfect cover for spending their time with any number of beautiful actresses that just happened to work for them. You see, the film industry was actually the cover, allowing men to take their mistresses to dinners or even to parties, providing a form of legalized whoring.69
Kennedy took full advantage, seeing a steady stream of actresses and dancers.
In November 1927, soon after the family’s move to Riverdale, Kennedy met Gloria Swanson, Hollywood’s reigning screen siren and the most powerful woman in the industry. The first actress to turn down a million dollars for a role, she and her films were subjects of feverish discussion in beauty parlors and church picnics across the country. A younger, more sophisticated version of Rose—they had the same dark hair, luminous skin, and petite figures—the twenty-eight-year-old captivated Kennedy with her street smarts and vivacity and her low, sultry voice. “Together we could make millions,” he assured her one night over dinner. Swanson, well aware of Kennedy’s reputation as one of the shrewdest moneymen in Hollywood and taken with his energy and good looks, agreed to let him manage her financial interests, which were a mess after several years of overspending and dubious investing.70
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