The House of Kennedy Read online

  Although many military insiders view the sinking of PT-109 as an accident at sea, Joe Sr. works the press, convincing Reader’s Digest to reprint for a mass readership John Hersey’s rousing account originally published in The New Yorker. His tactics work, bringing Jack’s story to a much larger readership, and fueling interest in the handsome homecoming hero.

  Among the journalists now jostling for exclusive interviews is none other than Inga Arvad, Jack’s Danish dream girl.

  While they had ended their relationship almost two years earlier, they had continued their correspondence. “As long as you have that feeling” for survival, Jack had written Arvad during his convalescence, “you seem to get through.” He confesses, “I’ve lost that feeling lately.” He adds with heartfelt declaration, “Knowing you has been the brightest part of an extremely bright 26 years.”

  In January 1944, she interviews him for the Boston Globe. “Real heroes,” he says, “are not the men who return, but those who stay out there like plenty of them do, two of my men included.”

  In June 1944, while in the hospital recovering from back surgery, Jack is awarded the Navy Marine Corps Medal and the Purple Heart. In March 1945, he receives a medical discharge from the navy, then signs on with the Hearst newspapers as a special correspondent.

  Politics “is Joe’s business,” Jack would tell his cousin Joe Kane, Joe Sr.’s nephew and political adviser. “I want to go into the news business.”

  But with Joe Jr.’s death in August of 1944, the political mantle is passed to Jack, or as Jack put it, “[The] burden falls to me.” Joe Sr. has issued his latest orders, and Jack would not be destined for journalism. “It was like being drafted.”

  By the Fourth of July, 1945, the entire family has fallen into line. At the holiday gathering in Hyannis Port, Grandfather Honey Fitz makes a toast. In 1915, when Joe Jr. was born, Honey Fitz had brashly predicted, “[Joe] is going to be the President of the United States,” the first among America’s Irish Catholics. But on that night during the final days of the war in the Pacific, James A. Reed, Jack’s friend from the navy, sees the former mayor look right at Joe and Rose’s second born when he raises a glass to the future president of the United States.

  Chapter 14

  On May 8, 1952, at an exclusive Washington dinner on Q Street NW hosted by the journalist Charles Bartlett and his wife, Martha, a statuesque brunette catches the eye of thirty-four-year-old Congressman Jack Kennedy.

  For the second time.

  The Bartletts made the initial introduction at a small garden party at their home in May 1951, but it failed to spark. The then twenty-one-year-old George Washington University student Jacqueline Bouvier had had a foreboding reaction to the thirty-three-year-old, third-term Democratic representative from Massachusetts.

  Jackie “had an absolutely unfailing antenna for the fake and fraud in people,” the art critic John Russell later says of his longtime friend, and at first meeting, she sensed that Jack was a man who “would have a profound perhaps disturbing influence on her life.”

  Time magazine notes, “legend claims that Jack Kennedy ‘leaned across the asparagus and asked for a date.’ Jackie denies the story; asparagus, she says, was not on the menu.” Either way, Jack fails to get the date.

  By Christmastime 1951, Jackie has instead become engaged to John G. W. Husted Jr., whose prominent family connections in part fueled his success on Wall Street. But the life Husted offered Jackie, while financially secure, is emotionally limited. In March 1952, Jackie cancels their plans for a June wedding.

  Instead, she pursues her work as the “Inquiring Camera Girl” at the Washington Times-Herald, where “Can you spot a married man?” is just one of the provocative questions she asks passersby on the streets of Washington, the population of which, at just over eight hundred thousand—over one hundred thousand larger than today—nevertheless has a small-town feel. As she is working at the same paper where, a decade earlier, Kick Kennedy and Inga Arvad had been on staff, it’s impossible not to be drawn into the Kennedy orbit. Jackie adds Jack’s book, Why England Slept, to her reading list.

  Although Jackie would call the Bartletts “shameless in their match-making,” she accepts their second invitation to dinner with a man who “looked a little lonesome and in need of a haircut and perhaps a square meal”—as Jackie’s sister, Lee Bouvier, would later describe the Senate hopeful.

  This latest meeting takes root, and Jackie later says she determined of their relationship, “Such heartbreak would be worth the pain.” On Jack’s part, Lem Billings suggests he found Jackie “a challenge,” and “there was nothing Jack liked better than a challenge.”

  Not only is Jackie beautiful and her manners impeccable—courtesy of the esteemed Miss Porter’s School—she’s sharp and entertaining. In Jackie, Jack finds an equal adopter of humor as a survival tactic. “She had such a wit,” her future White House social secretary, Letitia Baldridge, would observe. “She would have been terrible if she wasn’t so funny.” Jackie also has an enviable equestrian-set social status, inherited from her father, “Black Jack” Bouvier, to whom she bears a striking physical resemblance.

  As they begin to spend time together, exchanging gifts of books on history, poetry, and art, the new couple is quick to confide parental difficulties on both sides. While many would later name her father as the only man Jackie ever truly loved, despite his philandering, “Jackie really didn’t like her mother,” recalls Bouvier cousin and family biographer John Davis. Jack could cut even deeper on the subject of Rose. “My mother was a nothing.” And he chafes against Joe Sr.’s control. “I think my destiny is what my father wants it to be.”

  Jack struggles even more deeply with the numbing grief that comes from the loss of two siblings in less than five years. He bleakly describes Joe Jr.’s death in 1944 as having “a completeness…the completeness of perfection.” He keeps Joe Sr.’s 1935 letter that tells of beloved younger sister Kick who “thinks you are quite the grandest fellow who ever lived and your letters furnish most of her laughs.”

  Impatient with his son’s melancholy in the midst of a tough political contest, Joe delivers a stern mandate. A senator needs a wife. After all, Jack’s younger brother Bobby has been married to Ethel Skakel since 1950 and has already had the first of what will be eleven children.

  Jack is then campaigning against incumbent Republican senator Henry Cabot Lodge. “He spent half of each week in Massachusetts,” Jackie recalls. “He’d call me from some oyster bar up there, with a great clinking of coins, to ask me out to the movies the following Wednesday in Washington.”

  The distance gives Jackie time to make her own calculations, according to opinion writer Helen Lawrenson. “Jackie knew about it all, or, if not all—[the] hundreds of other women from secretaries and hotel maids to starlets, socialites and wives of his friends—she knew the score.”

  On November 4, 1952, Congressman Jack Kennedy defeats Lodge by just over seventy thousand votes to become the new senator from Massachusetts.

  In spring 1953, Jackie receives two big opportunities: an assignment to cover twenty-five-year-old Queen Elizabeth II’s June 2 coronation, and a proposal of marriage from Jack. She first heads off to London before answering, putting an ocean’s distance between them. Jackie “realized that if she married into that family, she would be expected to cater to their every whim. Kennedy women were treated like second-class citizens. Jackie wasn’t prepared to tolerate that,” fashion designer Estelle Parker opines. On the other hand, Jackie declares, the Kennedys “are nothing if not the most exciting family, perhaps in the world.”

  Despite her concerns, Jackie makes her decision and accepts Jack’s proposal—and the diamond and emerald engagement ring from Van Cleef & Arpels, the two central stones totaling nearly six carats. Their engagement is announced on June 24, 1953, and she resigns from the Times-Herald.

  “We are all crazy about Jackie,” Joe declares, although at first the Kennedy women are puzzled by her disdain for
athletics, her independence, her elegance, and her writerly pursuits. “‘Jack-leen,’ rhymes with ‘queen,’” Eunice says. Dinah Bridge, a family friend, says, “Jackie was put through her paces by the whole family. And she stood up extremely well to the Kennedy barrage of questions.” Rose settles on distant praise: “It would be hard to imagine a better wife for Jack.”

  Engagement doesn’t slow Jack’s philandering, however. A month before his wedding, the now thirty-six-year-old senator takes a bachelor adventure on the French Riviera. There he peels off from his Harvard roommate Torbert Macdonald to romance twenty-one-year-old Swedish socialite Gunilla Von Post, who recalls, “He spoke of his parents, his late brother, his sisters and brothers—but for the moment, there was no mention of a fiancée.” In 2010 and 2011, correspondence detailing further liaisons between the socialite and the then-future president fetched six figures. Jack’s last letter to Gunilla was dated 1956, three years after he wedded Jackie.

  Evelyn Lincoln, Senator Kennedy’s longtime executive secretary, whose upstanding Midwestern sensibility was often challenged by her employer’s personal assignments, said in an interview, “Half my time was spent with women trying to find out about him.”

  Regardless, on September 12, 1953, eight hundred elite guests gather at St. Mary’s Church in Newport, Rhode Island, to witness what Rose describes as “a splendid wedding” that introduces Jackie to “her new life as the wife of a political figure.” The mother of the groom details a press account, “It took almost two hours for the guests to pass through the reception line to greet the couple.”

  “It was a beautiful, fairy tale of a wedding,” says family friend Sancy Newman, noting how it was perfection personified. “Everyone said the most perfect things, wore the most perfect clothes, and had the most perfect manners. It was picture perfect.” According to another guest, it was “just like the coronation” of Queen Elizabeth that Jackie had reported on earlier that year.

  Less fittingly perfect is the incendiary rumor that their Newport wedding was not Jack’s first trip to the altar. Investigative reporter Seymour Hersh claims that in 1947, Jack, on a whim, had married Palm Beach socialite Durie Malcolm.

  Family friend Charles Spalding’s wife, Betty, quotes Eunice as confirming the quickie marriage: “There was a drunken party and they [Jack and Durie] went off to a justice of the peace to get married” at two in the morning. Spalding admits that at Jack’s request and with the help of a lawyer, he stole the marriage certificate from Palm Beach County offices, erasing any trace of a “high school prank, a little bit of daring that went too far.”

  But Durie, who was widowed by her fourth husband in 1996, denies the marriage to the Sunday Times of London: “I wouldn’t have married Jack Kennedy for all the tea in China. I’ll tell you why, if you want to know the truth. I didn’t care for those Irish micks, and old Joe was a terrible man.”

  The marriage may have been quietly annulled. Certainly, there is no record of a divorce, allowing the scandalous possibility that when Jack married Jackie in 1953, he became a bigamist, clouding the family record of his children.

  At the time of the wedding, the press vigorously investigates the Durie Malcolm story but doesn’t print it. Meanwhile, rumors of Jack’s further infidelities never quiet. Journalist and longtime family friend Arthur Krock warns of the consequences of a scandalous news story to Jack’s presidential aspirations, but Joe disagrees. “The American people don’t care how many times he gets laid.”

  “Kennedy men are like that,” Jackie herself would caution Joan Bennett before she became Mrs. Ted Kennedy in 1958. “You can’t let it get to you, because you shouldn’t take it personally.” Her words are a near echo of Josie Fitzgerald’s 1929 warning to Rose over Joe’s affair with Gloria Swanson.

  As Jackie writes to her friend and confidant, Reverend Joseph Leonard, an Irish priest she’d met in 1950, “Jack’s like my father in a way—loves the chase and is bored with the conquest—and once married needs proof he’s still attractive, so flirts with other women and resents you. I saw how that nearly killed Mummy.” It only takes Joan a few years of marriage to learn that her sister-in-law was right. “You just had to live with it.”

  The early days of the marriage are bumpy. “I was thirty-six, she was twenty-four. We didn’t fully understand each other,” Jack says, and Jackie, too remarks, “I found it rather hard to adjust [to married life as a politician’s wife].” It doesn’t help that Jackie is unfamiliar with—and uninterested in—politics, and Jack is often away from home. “I was alone almost every weekend,” she says. “Politics was sort of my enemy, and we had no home life whatsoever.” Complicating matters was Jack’s poor health, which needed to be constantly downplayed.

  Had the truth about Jack’s health gone to press, the American people might have felt the same way as Jackie did: afraid. “Jackie was usually the type to never show fear,” Lem Billings recalls, “but she was scared, very much so, about all of Jack’s illnesses. Not only did he have Addison’s disease [caused by underactive adrenal glands], he had a variety of back problems. He was on different drugs and medications, so many you couldn’t keep track of them all, including cortisone shots to treat the Addison’s. He had muscle spasms, and was being shot up with Novocain all the time. He was always very sick.”

  In October 1954, thirteen months after their wedding, Jackie stands alongside the priest speaking in Latin by Jack’s bedside at the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York. An attempted double fusion spinal surgery has left the senator in need of last rites. Jackie faces the very real possibility of losing her new husband. “I remember Jackie placing her hand on his forehead and saying, ‘Help him, Mother of God,’” Lem recalls.

  Miraculously, the senator survives, and in 1954 Jackie writes to Reverend Joseph Leonard, “I love being married much more than I did even in the beginning.” To Jack, she writes, “You are an atypical husband,” but “you mustn’t be surprised to have an atypical wife—each of us would have been so lonely with the normal kind.”

  By August 1956, the Kennedy clan has expanded. Eunice, Pat, and Jean have all gotten married. Eunice already has two children, Ethel is pregnant with her fifth, Pat with her second—and Jackie with her first. Despite the impending birth of their first child, however, Jack has gone off to cruise the Mediterranean, smarting from having recently lost the Democratic nomination for Adlai Stevenson’s Vice-Presidential running mate. So he’s nowhere to be found when Jackie is rushed to the hospital on August 23, 1956, only to deliver their daughter—whom she names Arabella—stillborn.

  The tragedy of that loss stays with her, but as she tells Reverend Leonard, she can see “so many good things that come out of this—how sadness shared brings married people closer together.”

  A little over a year later, on November 27, 1957, Jack and Jackie welcome a healthy daughter, whom they name Caroline.

  Jackie is delighted to be a wife and mother, but Jack’s main focus is still the possibility of a run for the presidency in 1960. While as of July 1958, Jack has still “said not a public word about wanting his party’s nomination,” the ambitions of “the handsome, well-endowed young author-statesman from Massachusetts” are easily understood, as outlined in a New York Times article entitled “How to be a Presidential Candidate.”

  Despite her new obligation to Caroline, Jackie isn’t going to sit at home simply missing Jack again. She accompanies him on the campaign trail, to excellent effect. While Rose sniffs that her daughter-in-law is “not a natural-born campaigner,” Kennedy aide Kenny O’Donnell recalls, “When Jackie was traveling with us, the size of the crowd at every stop was twice as big,” and Jack finds his wife’s judgment invaluable.

  She cannot stay on the road with him full-time, however, but often attends functions just for the chance to see him. At one such event, she remarks, “This is the closest I’ve come to lunching with my husband in months!” The campaigning pays off, and in July 1960, Jack Kennedy wins the presidential nomination at the
Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles. His wife, Jackie—now pregnant again—has done much to burnish his image, but many feel Jack is still a long shot against the seasoned Republican vice president Richard Nixon.

  In Jack’s ear is the voice of his friend Ben Bradlee, then reporting for Newsweek, “Do you really think—way down deep—that you can pull this thing off?”

  “If I don’t make a single mistake, yes,” he answers.

  Chapter 15

  A man in a well-tailored suit struts into the darkened Chicago courtroom. The sound of his heavy footfalls echoes off the stone floor as he passes the jury box and witness stand. Both are empty. But Judge William Tuohy’s chambers are not.

  The chief judge of Cook County Civil Court rises from his desk at the sight of the man whose face is obscured by a fedora and dark classes, taking the man’s entrance as his cue for departure.

  Joe Kennedy, already seated in chambers when the man arrives, won’t be leaving. This is his meeting, and he’s guaranteed, through the mob lawyer Robert McDonnell, that the discussion will be “very, very private.”

  Today’s meeting is between himself and a crime boss known by many names. “Mooney,” “Momo,” “Sam the Cigar,” and “Sam Flood,” are all aliases—the FBI would identify up to nineteen—for Salvatore Giancana, whose name appears in the Nevada Gambling Commission’s “Black Book” of top offenders, and who took control of the Chicago “outfit” in 1957.

  There’s no safer place from the ears of the FBI than a judge’s chambers.

  And no more dangerous person to proposition than Al Capone’s onetime “trigger man.” A Selective Service psychological evaluation had identified Giancana as a “constitutional psychopath with an inadequate personality.”

  Double-crossing the Sicilian American is a certain death sentence, even for a businessman as powerful as Joe Kennedy. Joe’s got big assets in Chicago—in 1945, he bought the Merchandise Mart for just under thirteen million dollars. Under the management of Eunice’s future husband, Sargent Shriver, the original Marshall Field building was transformed into the world’s largest office building. Now, as the 1960 presidential election gets under way, the facility is valued at more than one hundred and fifty million dollars. But even Joe doesn’t have the clout Giancana does.