The House of Kennedy Read online

  All the while, Joe is deepening a friendship and business relationship with the president’s son, James Roosevelt II, who finds himself caught between the interests of two powerful men he admires. In 1937 Joe writes, “You know as far as I am concerned…I am your foster-father.”

  As World War II looms in Europe, FDR knows that Joe is pining to be appointed the first Irish Catholic ambassador to Great Britain, but tells his son to instead offer him a consolation post. Arthur Krock, in his oral history interview for the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, relates Joe’s response: “He tried to get me to take the Secretaryship of Commerce and I knew it was only an attempt to shut me off from London, but London is where I want to go and it is the only place I intend to go and I told Jimmy so, and that’s that.”

  Upon receiving word of his reaction to the offer, the president calls Joe to the Oval Office. In his memoir, My Parents, James Roosevelt recalls the fun his father unleashes at Joe’s expense.

  FDR makes two requests. “Would you mind stepping back a bit, by the fireplace perhaps, so I can get a good look at you?” Then, “Joe, would you mind taking your pants down?”

  “I guess it was the power of the presidency,” James Roosevelt theorizes as despite their mutual confusion, Joe complies, standing in front of the president in his underwear.

  “Someone who saw you in a bathing suit once said something I now know to be true,” FDR states. “Joe, just look at your legs. You are just about the most bowlegged man I have ever seen. Don’t you know that the ambassador to the Court of Saint James’s has to go through an induction ceremony in which he wears knee breeches and silk stockings? Can you imagine how you’ll look? When photos of our new ambassador appear all over the world, we’ll be a laughingstock. You’re just not right for the job, Joe.”

  Still working the angles in spite of his embarrassment, Joe pleads, “Mr. President, if I can get the permission of His Majesty’s government to wear a cutaway coat and striped pants to the ceremony, would you agree to appoint me?”

  FDR won’t relent. “Well, Joe, you know how the British are about tradition. There is no way you are going to get permission, and I must name a new ambassador soon.”

  Joe continues to bargain. “Will you give me two weeks?”

  The president agrees—and how he laughs when Joe returns with official permission from the British government to wear trousers.

  When Joe later presents his credentials to His Majesty King George VI, some observers credit his stubborn Irish moxie for bucking the traditional garb of breeches and silk stockings. They have no idea it was FDR who put him up to it.

  Chapter 4

  On February 23, 1938, Joe Kennedy Sr. sets sail on the SS Manhattan for Southhampton, England, as the new American ambassador to the Court of St. James. He travels alone that day, but his family continues to make news. “The Kennedy Family: Nine Children and Nine Million Dollars” trumpets Life magazine in advance of their transatlantic crossing, and “Jolly Joe, the Nine-Child Envoy” is widely celebrated in London. “The Kennedys were the royal family that England wanted to have,” notes Will Swift, who writes about the Kennedys’ “thousand days” in London.

  The new ambassador, his wife, Rose, and their children settle in fashionable St. James Square, enjoying the diplomatic perks of chauffeured limos and a glittering social calendar. Rose delights in studying royal protocol in preparation for a May 11, 1938, presentation at Buckingham Palace for herself and her husband, along with their eldest daughters, eighteen-year-old Kathleen and nineteen-year-old Rosemary.

  The Kennedys are popular guests among British high society. At one 1938 dance, Lady Redesdale observes of Jack Kennedy, “I would not be surprised if that young man becomes President of the United States.”

  Jack’s sister Kathleen—originally nicknamed “Kick” because her siblings stumbled over the full pronunciation, but it stuck for her spirited antics—also makes a heightened impression. At elite parties, she chews gum and, in her unmistakable American accent, calls the Duke of Marlborough “Dookie-Wookie.” Lady Jean Ogilvy remembers Kick once starting a food fight, and how everyone at the table joined in. “If someone else had done that, it might have been rude or shocking…But she had this way about her that made it seem an absolute liberation,” notes Paula Byrne, a Kick biographer.

  Lem Billings, a family friend, recalls Kick’s declaration that her days in England made her “a person in her own right, not just a Kennedy girl.”

  Around the same time, Joe and Charles Lindbergh, America’s famous aviator, meet at the home of Lady Astor and form an instant friendship. Lindbergh is a Nazi sympathizer, and friendly with Hitler. Regarding the brewing war in Europe, Joe declares, “For the life of me I cannot see anything involved which could be remotely considered worth shedding blood for,” and blames the Jews for instigating the Nazi persecution, bluntly stating to his aide Harvey Klemmer, “They brought it on themselves.”

  The British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, also favors appeasement, and in September 1938 signs the Munich Agreement, which paves the way for Hitler to invade Czechoslovakia. “I believe it is peace for our time,” Chamberlain optimistically declares.

  But peace ends on September 3, 1939, when Hitler marches into Poland and England declares war on Germany.

  When Joe calls FDR with the news, his voice is trembling. “It’s the end of the world. The end of everything,” he says, and asks to come back to Washington. Roosevelt forbids any such acknowledgment of American fear.

  Nevertheless, Joe surreptitiously sends his family home immediately—taking precaution to book them on separate travel accommodations. Rose, Kick (age nineteen), Eunice (eighteen), and Bobby (thirteen), set out on September 12, 1939, aboard the SS Washington, crowded with nearly fifteen hundred Americans fleeing Europe. Patricia (fifteen), Jean (eleven), and Ted (seven), board a second vessel, and Joe Jr. (twenty-four), a third. Jack (twenty-two), crosses the Atlantic by plane. Only Rosemary, who turns twenty-one that September 13, stays “out of duty to remain behind with [her] father” at a convent school in rural Hertfordshire.

  With the bombing of London still a year off, and America’s entrance into the war uncertain, Joe takes bold, even reckless, action. Without consulting the State Department, he arranges a meeting with Hitler to “bring about a better understanding between the United States and Germany.” The attempt fails, effectively ending his ambassadorship, and perhaps his political career.

  Yet a letter to a friend reveals how quickly Joe is able to redirect his ambitions: “I find myself more interested in what young Joe is going to do than in what I am going to do with the rest of my life.”

  On the eve of the 1940 presidential election, Joe returns home, his ties to FDR severely diminished. He leans away from the president in favor of the inexperienced Republican candidate Wendell Willkie, who’d been a Democrat until 1939. But Roosevelt, who is running for an extraordinary (then constitutional) third term, needs Joe to secure the Catholic vote.

  With the election set for November 5, FDR extends Joe and Rose an invitation. “Come to the White House tonight for a little family dinner,” he offers, feeding Joe’s lust for presidential power, and the promises of future endorsements.

  Joe falls in line, agreeing to appear on a national radio broadcast in support of Roosevelt’s candidacy. He writes the speech in secret, revealing his words to no one.

  On October 29, 1940, Joe goes on the radio and speaks of America, of politics, and, finally, of his family. “After all, I have a great deal at stake in this country. My wife and I have given nine hostages to fortune. Our children and your children are more important than anything else in the world.”

  His popular ideas turn out the vote. Roosevelt is elected for a third term. At age fifty-six, Joe will see the president win a fourth term, too.

  Nine hostages to fortune. How darkly prophetic a father’s words would prove for his children.

  PART TWO

  The Two Roses

>   Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy and

  Rose Marie “Rosemary” Kennedy

  Chapter 5

  Public life starts early for the woman who will become the matriarch of the Kennedy political dynasty.

  With her long black hair, petite figure, and perfect posture, Rose Elizabeth is a familiar sight at campaign events for her father, John “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald. Young Rose has lost count how many times she’s accompanied her gregarious father on the piano. At weddings, wakes, or before the first pitch at the new Fenway Park, “Honey Fitz” plays to the crowds with his signature song, “Sweet Adeline.” By the time he is elected the first Irish American mayor of Boston in 1906, the year after Rose graduates from Dorchester High School, he has already served three terms in the US Congress.

  Though devoutly Catholic, Rose rejects the domesticity of her shy mother, Mary Josephine, or “Josie.” “I was crazy about traveling,” Rose recalls. (Her son Jack will grow to deeply resent her frequent absences, though his youthful anger—“Gee, you’re a great mother to go away and leave your children alone”—morphs into adult bitterness: “She was on her knees in churches all over the world.”)

  As a girl, what Rose prays for most ardently is handsome, charismatic Joseph Patrick Kennedy. She first set eyes on him at Old Orchard Beach, Maine, where Boston’s wealthy “lace curtain Irish” spent their summers.

  She was six and he was eight.

  They start dating when she is sixteen, perhaps the happiest year of Rose’s life. “I wish I was sixteen” again, she declares on her one hundredth birthday.

  But although Rose invites Joe to a graduation dance at Dorchester High, theirs is a forbidden courtship. Her father, Honey Fitz, detests the mediocre—in academics and athletics—member of the Harvard class of 1912, and he bans Joe from his house.

  “My father didn’t think I should marry the first man who asked me, and still I was very much in love, and I still didn’t want to offend my parents—so we used to have these rendezvous,” Rose recalls in the BBC documentary Rose Kennedy Remembers.

  Rose will have to part temporarily from Joe, however, and for an important reason. She’s been accepted by Wellesley College, the prestigious liberal arts school less than twenty miles from her home in the Boston suburb of Dorchester.

  She’ll miss Joe of course, but this will be her first adventure all her own. She plans to learn French and German, get her degree in music, and become a teacher.

  The evening before she’s set to leave for Wellesley, Honey Fitz sits his seventeen-year-old daughter down and tells her to unpack. She won’t be going. He and her mother, Josie, have decided that Rose is too young.

  It’s a selfish lie.

  The mayor wants to save his own political skin. In the midst of a challenging reelection campaign, the local bishop has warned Honey Fitz that his daughter’s attendance at a “modernist” secular college might cost him the Catholic vote.

  Honey Fitz nevertheless loses the 1908 election and breaks his daughter’s trust in him.

  “There was screaming and yelling and absolute madness,” Rose recalls to her niece, the writer Kerry McCarthy. “I was furious at my parents for years. I was angry at my church. As much as I loved my father, I never really forgave him for not letting me go.”

  Instead she enrolls in the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Boston but refuses to stop seeing Joe.

  Honey Fitz takes drastic measures. He sends Rose and her sister Agnes to a Sacred Heart convent in the Netherlands for the next school year.

  But when the homesick sisters return to Boston, Rose secretly starts seeing Joe again.

  When they go ice skating, she wears a veil to hide her face. She’ll allow other men to sign her dance card, but as soon as she is out of her mother’s chaperoning sight, Rose partners with Joe. When he invites Rose to his 1911 Harvard junior prom, the Fitzgerald family once again collapses into turmoil.

  Honey Fitz may be serving his second term as mayor of Boston, but his daughter is a citizen lost. He reluctantly gives Rose permission to marry Joe.

  On October 7, 1914, after seven years of clandestine courtship, Rose, then twenty-four, and Joe, twenty-six, have their wedding day in the private chapel adjoining the home of Cardinal O’Connell, who officiates the modest ceremony.

  Dressed in tails and a top hat, the ambitious young bank president looks the perfect groom. But as a husband, Joe will fall woefully short.

  Rose’s expectations of marriage are quickly dashed, especially in terms of sex.

  “Now listen, Rosie, this idea of yours that there is no romance outside of procreation is simply wrong. It was not part of our contract at the altar,” Joe tells her. “And if you don’t open your mind to this, I’m going to tell the priest on you.”

  Rose remains a dutiful wife. In the Brookline house on Beals Street, Joe Jr. is born in 1915, followed by Jack in 1917. Obstetrician Dr. Frederick L. Good delivers the eldest Kennedy sons, as he will all nine children in the family.

  But the birth of their third child goes terribly wrong.

  It’s September 13, 1918. World War I rages on, and so does a pandemic of Spanish influenza, infecting approximately five hundred million people, and killing fifty million worldwide, including six hundred seventy-five thousand Americans. Nearly seven thousand Bostonians have already died. To prevent further contamination, movie houses, churches, and other public gathering places are closed.

  Rose goes into labor at home, as planned. But Dr. Good is detained. All physicians have been pressed into service to treat the sick and dying.

  As biographer Kate Clifford Larson recounts, Rose was willing to wait, but the baby is not. She is already in the birth canal.

  The nurse orders Rose to squeeze her legs tightly together to delay the birth, and, incredibly, goes so far as to push the baby’s partially exposed head back into the birth canal for two excruciating hours—depriving the baby’s fragile system of oxygen—until Dr. Good arrives. When the doctor finally arrives, he delivers a baby girl and pronounces her healthy.

  Rosemary was “a beautiful child,” Eunice Kennedy Shriver later writes in an essay published in September 1962 by the Saturday Evening Post, “resembling my mother in physical appearance.”

  Rose will also share her own name, Rose Marie, with this newest arrival. The family calls her Rosemary.

  Though Rose employs a full household staff—baby nurse, housekeeper, cook (she never learned how to feed a family)—she insists, “It’s a good idea to be around quite often so that you know what’s going on,” and she soon observes that baby Rosemary lacks the coordination her two older brothers readily displayed as toddlers, struggling with tasks as basic as walking or holding objects.

  Joe desperately consults doctors and psychologists for a “cure,” but medicine has yet to make sufficient pharmacological or therapeutic advancements. “I had never heard of a retarded child,” Rose confesses. Specialists advise that Rosemary be confined to a mental institution.

  “What can they do for her that her family can’t do better?” Eunice recalls her father saying. “We will keep her at home.”

  Eunice underscores Joe’s words: “And we did.”

  Rosemary’s delays are cause for much dismay, especially as a reflection on her parents.

  “I would much rather be the mother of a great son or daughter than be the author of a great book or the painter of a great painting,” Rose famously says.

  Rosemary does not seem destined to meet the Kennedy standard of greatness.

  Chapter 6

  Rose can count on her husband, Joe Kennedy Sr., to provide for the family, but she cannot rely on his day-to-day presence. He travels frequently for business—and pleasure. She confides in her diary (today stored at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston) a torrent of feeling. She is at once certain of her husband’s infidelities (“I had heard that chorus girls were gay, but evil, and worst of all, husband snatchers”)—and dismissive of the idea (“But nothing shocking happened”).r />
  In 1920, while pregnant with her fourth child, Kathleen, Rose makes a bold break. She flees Beals Street for her presumed safe haven, the Fitzgerald residence. But Honey Fitz turns his daughter away, insisting that a wife must stand by her husband—as Rose’s mother, Josie, has done.

  Though the incident is never discussed outside the family, Rose’s youthful determination that her married life would be different, freer, than her mother’s, has faltered.

  While Rose extends her absence at a religious retreat, two-year-old Jack falls ill with scarlet fever. Though Boston City Hospital is already past capacity, Joe applies his negotiation skills to enlist the influence of Mayor Andrew Peters, and Jack is admitted for treatment. The worried father keeps a two-month bedside vigil. “During the darkest days,” Joe would write to Jack’s doctor once the rash and fever have subsided, “I felt that nothing mattered except his recovery.”

  In 1921, Rose is pregnant once again, this time with Eunice. Joe buys a new house for the family, at 131 Naples Road in Brookline. Rose describes the place as “bigger and better,” much like the “special presents” Joe bestows on her after the birth of each child. For instance, to celebrate Jean’s arrival in 1928, she has her choice among three diamond bracelets.

  At some point along the way, Rose decides to change her perspective.

  “I used to say, ‘Why did I spend time learning to read Goethe or Voltaire if I have to spend my life telling children why they should drink their milk or why they should only eat one piece of candy each day and then after meals.’ But then I thought raising a family is a new challenge and I am going to meet it.”

  Rose is a strict disciplinarian. She insists the children attend Sunday Mass (she attends daily), and as Proverbs 13:24 instructs, she does not spare the rod. Actually, she uses a ruler from her desk, or a wooden coat hanger, an object she reasons “didn’t hurt any more—probably less—than a ruler” to administer spankings “just hard enough to receive the message.”