Jack and Joe Junior in their Sunday best, Brookline, 1919.
The closeness between father and son was evident at the dinner table. More than mere meals, the Kennedy family suppers were seminars, in which Joe Senior quizzed his male progeny on the great international and domestic issues of the day. (Money and business were the only taboo subjects: “Big businessmen are the most overrated men in the country. Here I am, a boy from East Boston, and I took ’em. So don’t be impressed.”) Initially, he directed his questions largely to his eldest son, who more often than not parroted the father’s views; when Jack became old enough, he, too, was invited to participate, though usually only after his brother had spoken. “What do you think, Jack?” the father would say. “Give us your opinion.” Later, Bobby entered the mix. In this chauvinist culture, the girls were expected to listen respectfully while father and sons engaged, although Kirk LeMoyne “Lem” Billings, Jack’s closest friend and a frequent dinner guest, recalled that Kathleen (or “Kick” as everyone but her mother called her), who was “bright and on the ball” and “more like Jack in many ways,” regularly joined the conversation.4 When Joe Senior was out of town, Rose led the discussion, often from a prepared list of questions with an emphasis on literature and history, and again directing queries first at the two older boys:
“There are enormous dust storms sweeping through the Great Plains. Those poor people are breathing in dust and soot. What would you do if you were in their situation?”
“Poor Amelia Earhart is still missing. It’s been weeks. It seems impossible they haven’t found her. Where do you think she could be, children?”5
The meals could be tense times for friends of the children who were invited to stay. Would Mr. or Mrs. Kennedy turn to them to request a penetrating reflection? What if they didn’t understand the question, or didn’t know the first thing about the topic under discussion? One such friend, Harry Fowler, had come to the home with the illusion that summer was for fun and relaxation. “My lord, this is a nice summer afternoon,” he remembered thinking as he sat with the family at lunch. “What in the hell is Mrs. Kennedy doing anyway?”6
In truth, the pals needn’t have worried about being called on; they were nonplayers in these seminars. Mr. Kennedy in particular made clear that he was interested only in what his own sons had to say. His concern was molding them into the young men he wanted them to be; their friends were merely a distraction. When one of Jack’s schoolmates, new to the experience, made the mistake of asking a question, he was answered “rather curtly, as though [Mr. Kennedy] did not want to be bothered.” By contrast, any query from his sons, no matter how inconsequential, would elicit from the father a full and expansive answer, and often a return question.7
If the visitors begrudged the dismissive treatment, they also frequently remarked on Joseph Kennedy’s devotion to his children’s welfare and his commitment to parenting. More than most fathers of his generation, who tended to be remote figures in their households, Kennedy was deeply involved in child-rearing, especially after his return from Hollywood.8 In contrast to the more emotionally distant Rose, Joe was tactile and warm—Jean, number eight in the birth order, later referred to him as “cozy.” He almost never talked down to the kids, and was quick to forgive when they did wrong, quick to accept and move on when they failed to live up to his expectations. All the same, he didn’t spoil them. Even when he was away on business trips, the children sensed they were on his mind as he penned innumerable letters, encouraging them, guiding them, offering them tips on self-improvement, but seldom trying to force on them a particular career choice or life philosophy. Or at least not fully—because his own heroes were not artists or poets or philosophers but men of action, Kennedy took it for granted that his children would likewise gravitate in that direction. Above all, he preached that Kennedys always stood together, come what may—the family against the world. The kids, for their part, adored him and talked of him constantly. When he arrived home, they crowded around the door to greet him. When they had problems, they usually consulted him before their mother.9
“He was never abusive, never wounding toward any of his children, but he had a way of letting us know exactly what he expected of us,” wrote Edward (known to all as Teddy and later Ted), the youngest, in his affecting 2009 memoir True Compass. In one conversation, the father used phrasing “so concise and vivid” that his son could still recall the exact words sixty-five years later: “You can have a serious life or a nonserious life, Teddy. I’ll still love you whichever choice you make. But if you decide to have a nonserious life, I won’t have much time for you. You make up your own mind. There are too many children here who are doing things that are interesting for me to do much with you.” Never, Ted emphasized, was his father’s love for him in question: “We knew that we could always come home, that we could make mistakes, get defeated, but when all was said and done, we would be respected and appreciated at home.”10
Jack grasped that Joe Junior’s primogeniture gave him a stature within the brood that he himself could never attain. Yet he chafed against it just the same. He would have understood, if not entirely accepted with regard to his own case, psychologist Alfred Adler’s comment on the drama of birth order: “The mood of the second-born is comparable to the envy of the dispossessed with the prevailing feeling of having been slighted. His goal may be placed so high that he will suffer from it for the rest of his life, and his inner harmony be destroyed in consequence. This was well expressed by a little boy of four, who cried out, weeping, ‘I am so unhappy because I can never be as old as my brother.’ ” Henry James, whose age gap with his older brother, William, was similar to Jack’s vis-à-vis Joe, wrote that William “had gained such an advantage of me in his sixteen months’ experience of the world before mine began that I never for all the time of childhood and youth in the least caught up with him or overtook him.”11
Alone among the siblings, Jack tried to challenge Young Joe’s primacy. Though weaker and smaller, he was canny enough to constitute a threat in his brother’s eyes, even if he seldom got the upper hand in their physical encounters. There were fierce fights on the living room floor that left the younger kids cowering in terror or running upstairs. (Bobby would be especially distraught, crying, his hands over his ears.) Invariably, Jack ended up pinned and humiliated. They would go toe-to-toe on the athletic field, where Joe’s greater size and strength usually overcame Jack’s fortitude and physical coordination. Frequently outgunned, Jack would utilize the classic weapons of the weak: cunning and audacity. Years later, Rose recalled a typical incident in Hyannis Port in which Jack, having finished his dessert, swiped Joe’s from his plate and took off running, stuffing it in his mouth with his brother in hot pursuit, before he was finally forced to jump into the water to avoid being caught and pummeled, knowing what awaited him when he got out.12
When asked decades afterwards if anything had really troubled him in childhood, Jack could think of only one thing: his big brother. “He had a pugnacious personality,” he said of Joe. “Later on it smoothed out but it was a problem in my boyhood.”13
Far from working to ease the rivalry between his sons, Joe Senior stoked it. “Remember that Jack is practicing at the piano each day an hour and studying from one-half to three-quarters of an hour on his books so that he is really spending more time than you are,” he wrote the older boy in July 1926.14 When the two of them fought, he refused to intercede, viewing the competition, even when physical, as instilling toughness they would need in spades as they made their way in the world.
II
Did Jack resent the favoritism his parents showed toward his brother? One guesses he did, at least somewhat. According to Lem Billings, however, Jack found it fairly easy to forgive the partiality, because he never felt unfairly treated and because he treasured the space and relative anonymity his status as the second son provided. It allowed him to develop his natural inquisitiveness, to lose
himself in his reading and thereby escape, if only momentarily, the fever-pitched intensity of life in the Kennedy family. Confident that he matched or outshone his older brother in mental ability, and confined to his bed by frequent maladies, Jack cultivated an intellectual prowess that no one else in the family really had, and this proved irritating to Joe Junior, who expected to be the best in everything.15
Words and their meanings interested Jack. He was the only one in the family, his sister Eunice said, “who looked things up,” the one who “did the best on all the intellectual things and sort of monopolized them.” Rose remembered that “he gobbled books,” and “not necessarily the ones I had so thoughtfully chosen for him from the PTA- and library-approved lists.” More than any of his siblings, he internalized his mother’s mantra that reading constituted “the most important instrument of knowledge.” Biography, history, tales of adventure and chivalry—these were his genres, as he devoured Robert Louis Stevenson and Sir Walter Scott and read and reread Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome. The cadences of historical prose appealed to him, and he had a first-rate memory of what he read, often able to recall scenes and quotations with astonishing accuracy, even decades later. “He had a strong romantic and idealistic streak,” Rose said. “In fact, he was inclined to be somewhat of a dreamer. I often had the feeling his mind was only half occupied with the subject at hand, such as doing his arithmetic homework or picking his clothes up off the floor, and the rest of his thoughts were far away weaving daydreams….I remember him in his boyhood reading and rereading his copy of King Arthur and the Round Table.”16
One also detects from an early point a sense of ironic self-awareness and detachment concerning the Kennedy clan’s peculiarities that his older brother entirely lacked. Jack could be at once of the family and apart from it. In a family that prized punctuality, he was habitually late. Notwithstanding his mother’s obsessive focus on order and decorum, he was sloppy, forgetful, irreverent—and grew more so over time. In the winter of 1932, when two friends picked him up from the Bronxville train station, he remarked sardonically, “I want to stop by the house for a minute, and check the nursery and see if there’s anybody new in the family.” He came out and exclaimed, “By God, there is!” (It was Teddy, born on February 22.)17
As Rose later put it, from boyhood on, Jack “thought his own thoughts, did things his own way, and somehow just didn’t fit any pattern. Now and then, fairly often in fact, that distressed me, since I thought I knew what was best. But at the same time that I was taken aback, I was enchanted and amused. He was a funny little boy, and he said things in such an original, vivid way.” At least compared with his three brothers, a friend noted, Jack was “neither pushy nor calculating.” Another acquaintance expanded on the point, describing Jack as “a loner, a self-contained person. It may be that in the intensely competitive family situation he withdrew somewhat into himself, learned to keep his own counsel, and put a layer of insulation between himself and other people.”18
“Unquestionably,” historian Herbert Parmet would write, “the introspective second son was the one who resembled his father least of all.”19
Yet Jack was also plainly devoted to his family, and fiercely loyal. He cared about what his parents thought, and during his prep school years cherished his vacation visits home. His father was now around much more, having left Hollywood behind, and his parents’ marriage seemed stronger, even with his continued serial womanizing. (Rose Kennedy in her memoirs describes the early 1930s as a golden time, as she and Joe spent long hours with each other, walking hand in hand along the shore at the Cape or through the Bronxville woodlands.) Meanwhile, Jack formed a special bond with Kick, three years younger, who possessed a quick, self-deprecating sense of humor much like his own (Joe Junior’s was more biting and sarcastic) and whose radiant charm and free-spiritedness he found enchanting. He enjoyed spending time with his other younger siblings as well—upon Teddy’s birth he asked his parents if he could be named the godfather, and was granted his wish. (He had less luck with another suggestion: that the boy be named George Washington Kennedy, since he shared a birthday with the first president.) When Teddy got a little older, it was Jack who taught him how to ride a bicycle and sail.20
What’s more, for all the differences with Young Joe and all the intense competition between them, the two brothers shared a common vitality and mutual affection. From an early age they were each other’s number-one playmate, and they had innumerable adventures together—in Brookline, in New York, in Hyannis Port, and later in prep school and college.*1 From his brother Jack learned how to sail—how to be an effective crewman, how to shift ballast in a jib, how to secure the advantage in tight races. Joe Senior recalled that his two oldest boys “were out in sailboats alone here in Hyannis Port when they were so small you couldn’t see their heads. It looked from shore as if the boats were empty.” The boys christened their first boat the Rose Elizabeth, after their mother, and spent endless hours tinkering with it and learning to sail it with consummate skill and speed. As competitive as they could be with each other, they fought much more fiercely as a team against outsiders, whether on the sporting field or in the schoolyard.21
A letter from Jack to his mother on Choate letterhead, February 1932. The P.S. reads: “Can I be Godfather to the baby.”
Years later Jack would write:
I have always felt that Joe achieved his greatest success as the oldest brother. Very early in life he acquired a sense of responsibility towards his brothers and sisters and I do not think that he ever forgot it….He would spend long hours throwing a football with Bobby, swimming with Teddy and teaching the younger girls how to sail….I think that if the Kennedy children amount to anything now or ever amount to anything, it will be due more to Joe’s behavior and his constant example than to any other factor. He made the task of bringing up a large family immeasurably easier for my father and mother for what they taught him, he passed on to us and their teachings were not diluted through him but strengthened.22
Those parental teachings centered on the importance of education, of avoiding idleness, of respecting public service, of loyalty to family. But more than anything, they were about winning. The point, Joe Senior insisted time and again, was not to play well, to compete for the sake of competing, but to defeat all comers, to secure the top prize. Even good sportsmanship paled in comparison. “We want no losers around here, only winners,” he proclaimed. From the time the children were six or seven years old, Joe and Rose entered them in swimming and sailing races, taking care to put them in different categories so they didn’t have to race each other. Always, Joe exhorted them to reach the finish line first. “The thing he always kept telling us was that coming in second was just no good,” remarked Eunice, who became an excellent sailor and all-around athlete. “The important thing was to win—don’t come in second or third, that doesn’t count, but win, win, win.” Small wonder that the Kennedys took on the reputation within the Hyannis community of being graceless competitors, of being willing to do anything to prevail. Though not an accomplished sailor himself, Joe Senior would follow his kids’ boats and make note of deficiencies he saw in performance or effort. Any slacker would be subjected to a stern talking-to at dinner in front of the family and sent in disgrace to eat alone in the kitchen.23
“My husband was quite a strict father,” Rose later acknowledged. “He liked the boys to win at sports and everything they tried. If they didn’t win, he would discuss their failure with them, but he did not have much patience with the loser.”24
One of Jack’s friends, Paul Chase, remembered seeing—and hearing—Mr. Kennedy’s win-at-all-costs approach up close. “Several times, Jack asked me to crew for him when he could not find anyone else. Once we lost badly and caught a half-hour lecture from the old man on our return to shore. He said he had watched the race and that he was disgusted with both of us. There was no sense, he claimed, in g
oing into a race unless you did your damnedest to win, an endeavor at which we had failed miserably. He was really angry with us.”25
Chase’s anecdote hints at the possibility of a more benign assessment of Joe Kennedy’s relentlessness: that it was less about winning than about expending maximum effort in the attempt. The Kennedy kids were expected to always work harder than anyone, Robert Kennedy later wrote, even if others in the competition were more talented. “ ‘After you have done the best you can,’ he used to say, ‘the hell with it.’ ”26
The house in Hyannis Port.
Visitors to the Hyannis Port home marveled at the sheer orchestration of daytime activity. Here the summers were not holidays, filled with lassitude and soaking in the sun. Joe could not abide his offspring lounging around, even briefly, and he insisted on a packed schedule. His wife felt the same. Each evening, she posted a schedule of events for the following day—moving from tennis to golf to swimming to sailing, sometimes with professional instructors alongside. On a bulletin board next to the dining room she pinned articles from magazines and newspapers that she wanted her kids to read, and she scattered special lamps throughout the house to encourage reading.*2 Friday night was movie night in the basement, with its twenty-seven-seat theater. Saturdays were taken up with more sporting activities, and another movie or a game of charades after dinner. The younger children, supervised by a nurse, were forbidden from riding their bikes off the property; the older ones, watched over by a governess, were expected to be in the house when the lights went on at dusk. All had to be seated at the dining table five minutes before mealtimes, with dinner served promptly at 7:15 each evening. Rose had clocks placed in each room so no one would be late.27
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