Soon they became lovers. In her memoirs, Swanson recalled the first time they had sex, in a Palm Beach, Florida, hotel in February 1928 (just as Rose Kennedy was preparing to give birth to daughter Jean back in Boston). “Since his kiss on the train, I had known this would happen. And I knew, as I lay there, that it would go on. Why? I thought. We were both happily married with children….All arguments were useless, however. I knew perfectly well that whatever adjustments or deceits must inevitably follow, the strange man beside me, more than my husband, owned me.” There followed many “intimate hours together” at Kennedy’s rented house on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, after which “Joe would have one of his horsemen [often the ubiquitous Eddie Moore] drive me home.”71 Mesmerized with Swanson as with no lover before, Kennedy led a split life, between his wife and family on the one hand, and his Hollywood megastar, the ultimate trophy mistress, on the other. Not completely split, however—Swanson and her husband on one occasion traveled with Rose and Joe in Europe (the two women shopped together at the exclusive Paris couturier Lucien Lelong), and she was a guest of the Kennedy family in their home.72
Swanson tried to resist the European excursion, but it was pointless. “When his mind was made up,” she later wrote, “there was not a big enough lever in the world to move him. I might argue all day, but I knew he would only out-argue me.” So she agreed to “throw a shawl over my scarlet letter and have tea with his wife and my husband and the vicar, doubtless, not to mention the press.”73
Rose Kennedy would always deny that her husband had anything other than a professional relationship with Swanson. According to Eunice Kennedy Shriver, her mother didn’t even hear rumors about the affair until the 1960s, and then waved them off. The claim of ignorance seems hard to believe. More likely, Rose knew about the romance while it was going on but chose to suppress it, to pretend it wasn’t there. “Mrs. Kennedy had this amazing knack for shutting out anything she did not want to know or face or deal with, and conversely of actually believing what she wanted to believe,” an employee in the household recalled. Perhaps some small part of Rose even condoned the relationship, or at least understood it, in view of what appears to have been her highly circumscribed view of what constituted proper sexual behavior for a devout Catholic—in essence, outside of procreation, intercourse should be sharply limited, in both frequency and duration—and her knowledge that it conflicted with her husband’s sex drive.74
For his part, Joe Kennedy knew that his philandering was wrong, that adultery was contrary to God’s word. But he also believed in confession and the forgiveness of sins. So he went on straying from the marriage bed. Obsessively focused on winning, on conquest, he always wanted more, more, more—in all areas of life. A journalist who knew him speculated that for Kennedy, a mistress was “another thing that a rich man had—like caviar. It wasn’t sex, it was part of the image…his idea of manliness.”75
Never, it seems, did Kennedy seriously consider leaving Rose for another woman, not even for Gloria Swanson. The actress hints in her memoirs that he contemplated forsaking Rose for her, but the notion is far-fetched.76 She was a huge catch, one of the most alluring women in the entire world, and dating her gave Kennedy prestige in Hollywood and—even more so—among his astonished Harvard friends. But he spent less time with her than he might have if the affair were as important to him as Swanson wanted it to be. For Kennedy, family was ultimately sacrosanct, even if he often had an odd and callous way of showing it. His preferred arrangement, common enough among men of his station, was having a wife at home and girlfriends away from home. By the fall of 1929 the affair had run its course, and Kennedy was readying to leave Hollywood and the film business behind—$5 million richer, thirty pounds lighter, and fighting an ulcer.77
He needed to rein himself in, he understood, needed to return to the more buttoned-up Northeast, to his wife and kids. Earlier in 1929, P. J. Kennedy had become deathly ill, at age seventy-one. (Mary Augusta had died in 1923.) Joe had spent several days by his father’s bedside in Boston in the final days; when P. J. seemed to rally, the son took it as a sign he could return to California, only for death to come on May 18. Nor did he travel back from Hollywood for the funeral (he sent Rose and Joe Junior in his place), a decision he regretted instantly. Never the introspective sort, Kennedy nonetheless understood that, having turned forty and with his father now gone, he needed to get his priorities in order, lest he lose his family. He had to be home, and home was not the wild west of glitzy young Southern California.78
And besides, even with his gargantuan work ethic, Kennedy found it hard to give sufficient attention from Los Angeles to the chattering stock ticker in New York. Now, as he gradually transitioned back to the East, he could afford to do that. He sensed big things were in the offing on Wall Street and made a major decision, one that went against the crowd and the consensus of expert opinion: he got out. Guy Currier, a well-connected and flamboyant lawyer to whom Kennedy often turned for advice, had warned him that the stock market seemed inflated, edgy, precarious, the danger signs flashing all around. Kennedy, predisposed toward pessimism, agreed, and he systematically went about liquidating much of his vast portfolio, even as the bankers and industrialists and traders around him stayed bullish. When prices began falling in September 1929, he stood at a safe distance. He remained there when the bottom fell out on October 29, Black Tuesday.79
One of Kennedy’s Harvard classmates, historian Frederick Lewis Allen, captured the moment in his classic work Only Yesterday:
The big gong had hardly sounded in the great hall of the Exchange at ten o’clock Tuesday morning before the storm broke out in full force. Huge blocks of stock were thrown upon the market for what they would bring. Five thousand shares, ten thousand shares appeared at a time on the laboring ticker at fearful recessions in price. Not only were innumerable small traders being sold out, but big ones, too, protagonists of the new economic era who a few weeks before had counted themselves millionaires. Again and again the specialist in a stock would find himself surrounded by brokers fighting to sell—and nobody at all even thinking of buying.80
VII
It is tempting to see the Kennedy marriage in this period as little more than an elaborate masquerade, or at best as a sterile collaboration between two people who felt little for each other but were stolidly committed to raising successful children. The temptation should be resisted. If (as some authors assert) the Kennedys’ relationship had become largely sexless by the end of the decade, and if they kept aspects of their emotional lives from each other, it is also true that they maintained a strong bond. The letters between them (especially those from Joe) attest to that fact. There was affection in their long talks about their children, and comfort in their shared history and rituals. Joe was proud of Rose as a dedicated mother and as an intelligent and talented wife, and she admired and treasured his deep commitment to the kids’ welfare and his interest in their many activities and accomplishments.81
Still, the tensions in the marriage in the late 1920s were real enough, visible not only to the household staff but to the older children as well, who knew full well that their father carried on with other women. Joe’s long absences in California (and Palm Beach, where he liked to spend time in winter), combined with Rose’s own weeks-long travels, meant that for significant stretches, the Kennedy children had to make do with surrogate parents, whether in the form of the staff or the ever loyal Eddie and Mary Moore. Did young Jack resent the marital discord in this period, and his mother’s absences? The record is unclear, but surely he did, at least to a degree.82 Any child would. Some later authors would see in Rose’s trips proof of her emotional sterility and lack of maternal love, and of her “managerial” approach to parenting. But though it’s true that she always withheld a part of herself, did not let motherhood consume her, and at times stood slightly apart from the whirlwind of family activity, can one really blame her? She had eight children,
with one more to come, and was married to a serial adulterer, one who thought nothing of occasionally bringing a mistress home for dinner. Maintaining a separate identity was for her a form of self-preservation. To numerous contemporary observers, including her son Jack, Rose was the glue that held the family together. As one close friend told a biographer, “Joe provided the fire in the family, but Rose provided the steel, and still does.”83
Decades later, Jack offered a revealing and generous summation of his mother: “She was a little removed and still is, which I think is the only way to survive when you have nine children. I thought she was a very model mother for a big family.”84
Whatever the strains he felt at home after the move to New York, Jack appears to have adjusted reasonably well to the new surroundings, and to Riverdale Country School. His teachers described him as bright, confident, and personable, while friends remembered him as popular, athletic, and girl crazy. In sixth grade, Jack received excellent grades in his history bimonthly reports (with scores consistently in the nineties) and won the school’s commencement prize for best composition. “Far be it from the Kennedys to spoil their children,” Harold Klue, one of his social studies teachers, recalled. “They were taught to do for themselves and think for themselves.”85
Jack, for one, certainly didn’t think he was being spoiled. Although at one time or another all of the Kennedy kids hit their father up for an increased weekly allowance, no effort would be quite as stylish as Jack’s “Plea for a Raise,” issued to “My Mr. J. P. Kennedy” sometime during the first year in New York, and invoking a phrase from I Corinthians 13:
My recent allowance is 40¢. This I used for aeroplanes and other playthings of childhood but now I am a scout and I put away my childish things. Before I would spend 20¢ of my ¢.40 allowance and in five minutes I would have empty pockets and nothing to gain and 20¢ to lose. When I am a scout I have to buy canteens, haversacks, blankets, searchlidgs [sic], ponchos, things that will last for years…and so I put in my plea for a raise of thirty cents for me to buy scout things and pay my own way more around.86
The appeal worked: “Mr. J. P. Kennedy” granted the increase.
In the seventh grade, Jack’s grades slipped into the average range. “Creditable,” his generous headmaster noted of his overall performance, while a classmate recalled that Jack’s main concern that year seemed to be “getting a date for the Saturday afternoon movie.”87 (Like many twelve-year-old boys, he was shy around girls—according to family lore, he could barely bring himself to speak to them when they started calling the house.) Perhaps, too, the disruption caused by another move affected his academic performance: in May 1929 the family moved to a twelve-room colonial on Pondfield Road in Bronxville, a one-square-mile village close to Riverdale. Central Manhattan was fifteen miles to the south. Joe paid $250,000 for the mansion (about $3.7 million today), named Crownlands, which sat on six acres of lush lawns and boasted a grass tennis court, a five-car garage, and gardener’s as well as chauffeur’s cottages. Joe Junior, Jack, and eventually Bobby rode the bus to school in Riverdale, while the girls attended the public Bronxville School.
Crownlands, however, was not Joe’s most important home purchase of the period. After their humiliating snubbing in Cohasset, the family had spent several summers fifty miles to the south, in Hyannis Port, on the Cape Cod peninsula. A small hamlet next to the larger town of Hyannis, Hyannis Port comprised about a hundred well-built, roomy, shingled or clapboard houses, separated from one another by manicured hedges or low stone walls. It was not yet the fashionable place it would become, and was far less of a summer destination for Boston’s elites than Cohasset or Bar Harbor or Newport, but it nevertheless had several things in its favor: good railway access, sandy beaches, a Catholic church, a golf club that was willing to accept Joe Kennedy as a member, and a yacht club where Joe Junior and Jack, and the other children as they grew older, could learn to sail and race. Best of all, Hyannis Port contained no concentration of “proper Bostonians” who would look down their noses at the upstart Irish Catholic Kennedys. And it gave Rose the Massachusetts anchor she desperately missed—and wanted. The family rented Malcolm Cottage, a rambling three-gabled house on Marchant Avenue, with white wooden shingles and black shutters, wide porches, two and a half acres of sloping lawn where the kids could play, a tennis court, and a private beach with a superb view of Nantucket Sound. A breakwater poked out to the left to protect against the battering of the ocean waves.
Eight little Kennedys in a row: Jean, Bobby, Pat, Eunice, Kathleen, Rosemary, Jack, and Joe Junior, in Hyannis Port, August 1928.
In 1928, Joe purchased the property in his and Rose’s names and immediately commissioned an addition that more or less doubled the home’s size and gave them fifteen rooms and nine baths, plus an RCA sound theater (unheard of in a private residence at the time) in the basement. It would become, more than any other residence, what the Kennedys meant when they spoke of “home,” the place where Joe, newly returned to the East Coast, would, during days of ceaseless activity, set about molding his children.88
For the two oldest boys in particular, Hyannis Port would take on far more meaning than the Bronxville house ever would. For their days of living at home during the academic year were rapidly coming to a close. Boarding school beckoned.
*1 The evening edition of The Boston Globe on the day of the birth indicated the momentousness of the time. Separate headlines on page 1 announced that the British had lost three ships in the latest fighting, that the U.S. government was going after draft opponents, that the French had scored a major victory near Verdun, and that veterans of the American Civil War were calling on the nation’s young men to repeat their example (“Message of the boys of ’61 to boys of ’17: ‘We carried the flag then, you carry it now’ ”).
*2 Of the 3,500 Americans who volunteered to go to the front as ambulance drivers during the period of U.S. neutrality in 1914–17, some 450 were undergraduates or alumni of Harvard. They included novelists Charles Nordhoff (’09) and John Dos Passos (’16) and poets e. e. cummings (’15), Robert Hillyer (’17), and Archibald MacLeish, LL.B. ’19). Alan Seeger (’10), whose poem “I Have a Rendezvous with Death” would become a favorite of John F. Kennedy’s (and whose nephew, the folk singer and activist Pete Seeger, would be a classmate of Kennedy’s), joined the Foreign Legion in August 1914 and was killed on July 4, 1916, just as the Somme offensive began and as Joe Kennedy entertained his friends in Winthrop. Ultimately, more than eleven thousand Harvard men would serve in the war, including during the period of American belligerency; 373 died in service, of whom 43 had not yet graduated.
*3 The bootlegger myth may have been fed by the fact that he made a killing importing Haig & Haig and Dewar’s Scotch after Prohibition’s repeal, in 1933. Indeed, even before the formal repeal, Kennedy, having secured distribution rights from the British distillers, stockpiled thousands of cases of liquor in his newly created Somerset Importers warehouses. (The shipments came in legally under “medicinal” licenses issued in Washington.) (Whalen, Founding Father, 136.)
THREE
SECOND SON
They were born less than two years apart, and before all the others. And they were boys in a male-centered household. Just as their father and their grandfathers had held privileged perches in their own homes growing up, so Joe Junior and Jack had pride of place among their siblings. But they were not equals. Joe Junior, or Young Joe, as he was sometimes called, held the position of primacy as the eldest. In his facial features and dark hair he was a Fitzgerald, but in physique and temperament he resembled his father—rugged and combative, gregarious and dynamic, with a captivating smile, a hot temper, and a cocksure, competitive spirit, in contrast to the quieter, more introspective, more Rose-like Jack. Aware from an early age that, as the first son, he had a special burden as the bearer of the family’s aspirations, Joe exuded a sense of responsibility that m
ade him seem older than his years. Earnest and goal-oriented, he was determined to live up to the exacting standards his father and mother set for him.
If Young Joe had any doubts about his standing in the family, his parents wiped them away. The father saw him as an extension of himself, while Rose determined early on that her hearty and handsome firstborn was the son destined for greatness. For a long time it was inconceivable to either parent that their sickly second son could be as smart as, or even smarter than, his brother, never mind that the most cursory look at their respective letters home from school would suggest as much. (In an interview half a century later, Rose acknowledged that testing had indicated Jack had the higher IQ, but she said she didn’t believe it, either at the time of the test or subsequently.1) When Joe Junior was little, author Doris Kearns Goodwin has written, mother and father would break into radiant smiles at the mere sound of his voice calling or talking. “From all accounts, this was clearly a child of love. Emotions resonated between young Joe and his parents that none of the others would ever know, that none of the others would ever forget.”2
As he grew older, Joe Junior would assume the role of paternal stand-in during Joe Senior’s many absences. He did not hesitate to dole out discipline. “It was not the father they were afraid of,” said one family acquaintance, “it was Joe Junior. The real reason they didn’t sneak a smoke here and there was that they were afraid he would find out and beat the hell out of them.” But he could be loving and kind as well, patiently teaching the younger kids on the athletic field and in the pool. It meant the world: when Joe came home from school, it was not uncommon to see one or more of the younger children running to give him a hug and a kiss as if he were their father and not their brother. To little Bobby he became a hero figure. “My brother Joe took the greatest interest in us,” Bobby later said. “He taught us to sail, to swim, to play football and baseball.”3
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