An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963 by Robert Dallek
Joe loved that his large family made him and Rose an object of public attention. He also loved the message sent by his being able to provide lavishly for so large a brood. In 1921 he had moved the family into a larger Brookline house only a five-minute walk from Beals Street at the intersection of Naples and Abbotsford Roads. The twelve-room two-and-a-half-story house with a long enclosed front porch, where the Kennedy children could play, provided enough room not only for the whole family but also for a hospital-trained live-in nursemaid and a separate room for Rose, where she could have a small measure of privacy from the daily challenge of raising so many children. It was a challenge at which neither Joe nor Rose could claim unqualified success.
FOR ALL THE FAMILY’S WEALTH, status, and outward appearance of unity and good cheer, Joe and Rose had personal issues that strained their marriage and burdened their children. Rose’s religious education, the intense requirements of her orthodoxy, left limited room for the joy her comfortable existence opened to her. For Joe, the harshness of the social slights he had suffered at Harvard, at their summer homes, and in the banking and business worlds from folks contemptuous of upstarts like him rankled throughout his life and drained some of the pleasure from his rise to prominence.
To be sure, they were a well-matched couple—similar backgrounds, similar aspirations for wealth and prominence—but they were also decidedly different: complementary opposites. Rose was the consummate conformist. She meticulously followed the social mores of the day, whether set down by her church or by the larger society around her. Joe, too, was a great conformist—striving to achieve a kind of universal acceptability—but he also prided himself on being unconventional: bolder, more adventurous than everyone else, and, if need be, a rule breaker. Innovation, thinking imaginatively, would be a hallmark of his business career and a trait he passed along to a few—though not all—of his children.
Joe’s independence and willingness to defy accepted standards partly expressed itself in compulsive womanizing. Speculation abounds that Rose’s unresponsiveness to a man with normal appetites drove him into the arms of chorus girls, starlets, and other casual lovers. A mainstay of Kennedy family biographies is the story of Joe teasing Rose in front of friends about her sexual inhibitions. “Now listen, Rosie,” he would say. “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, the priest never said that and the books don’t argue that. And if you don’t open your mind on this, I’m going to tell the priest on you.” But Rose apparently remained unresponsive to Joe’s desires. According to one family friend, after their last child was born in 1932, Rose declared, “No more sex,” and moved into a separate bedroom.
But even if Rose had not denied him her favors, Joe would have been a compulsive philanderer. For someone who needed to win, win, win, who could never be content with great success in one arena, who spent his life seeking new challenges in business—banking, liquor, movies, stocks, real estate—and politics, it is difficult to imagine that he would have been content with one woman.
Joe made little effort to hide his womanizing. In 1921, for example, he brazenly wrote a theatrical manager in New York: “I hope you will have all the good looking girls in your company looking forward with anticipation to meeting the high Irish of Boston because I have a gang around me that must be fed on wild meat.” A political reporter who knew Joe thought that for him women “were another thing that a rich man had—like caviar. It wasn’t sex, it was part of the image . . . his idea of manliness.” Joe even brought mistresses into the Kennedy home, the young women eating meals with the family and becoming part of the daily household routine. Betty Spalding, the wife of one of Jack’s closest friends, who witnessed the process, exclaimed, “And the old man—having his mistresses there at the house for lunch and supper! I couldn’t understand it! It was unheard of.” Joe served propriety by describing the young women to visitors as friends of his daughters.
But there were some limits. An affair with movie actress Gloria Swanson in the late 1920s almost broke up the Kennedy marriage. The romance was an open secret, with one Boston newspaper reporting that Joe’s phone calls to Gloria in California from New York amounted to “the largest private telephone bill in the nation during the year 1929,” even though Joe had taken precautions to ensure that the affair was never so obvious that Rose would be unable to deny its existence to herself and others. But there is evidence that Honey Fitz argued with Joe over the affair, threatening to tell Rose if Joe did not end it. Stubbornly, Joe refused, warning his father-in-law that he might then divorce Rose and marry Gloria. Though Joe eventually broke off the relationship with Swanson when he left the movie industry in 1929-30, it scarred the Kennedy household and made for difficulties with the children that never disappeared.
Like Joe, Rose was an imperfect parent. Part of her difficulty was Joe’s insistence that she confine herself to “women’s work” in the family. Generally, she played the good wife and repressed her irritation at being inhibited by her overbearing husband. “Your father again has restricted my activities and thinks the little woman should confine herself to the home,” she complained to the children in February 1942. Rose was also unhappy with Joe’s many absences attending to business in New York and California, which threw the burden of child rearing largely on her. Despite a large retinue of household help, she was under constant pressure to attend to the needs of so many small children during repeated pregnancies. Indeed, between 1914 and 1932, the eighteen years after she and Joe married, Rose was with child nearly 40 percent of the time. Moreover, a sense of isolation from her previously glamorous life as the mayor’s favorite daughter and a prominent Boston debutante joined with Joe’s philandering to drive her into a brief separation from him early in 1920. Pregnant with her fourth child and exhausted by mothering three others between the ages of one and five, she returned to her father’s home for three weeks before he insisted that she “go back where you belong.” Moved by her father’s insistence that she make her marriage work, as well as her attendance at a religious retreat on the obligations of a Catholic wife and mother, Rose returned to her Brookline house with a renewed determination to succeed at the job of building a successful family.
As part of an agreement with Joe on how to sustain their marriage and serve the children’s well-being, Rose regularly traveled around the United States and abroad as a way to free her from constant household demands. In the mid-thirties, she made seventeen trips to Europe, where she shopped for the latest fashions and enjoyed sight-seeing excursions. Assured that Joe, who arranged to be at home during her absences, or at least close enough in case of an emergency, would attend to the children, Rose took special pleasure in the freedom and stimulation reminiscent of her premarital travels. During their respective separations from the family, Rose and Joe agreed that neither would burden the other with current family problems. Joe, for example, never reported an outbreak of measles in the household while Rose was away in California for six weeks. “He didn’t want to worry me and perhaps cause me to cancel part of my trip,” Rose recalled. Similarly, when Joe called from California during one of his frequent trips to Hollywood, Rose told him nothing about a car accident that had her lying down with “a good-sized gash in my forehead. . . . I spoke naturally, gave him news of the children and told him what a fine day it was: a perfect day for golf. Then I drove to the hospital where the doctor took five stitches in my forehead.” It was an accommodation that allowed them to keep their family intact and enjoy a privileged life. But it never eliminated the many difficulties that would belie the picture of a well-adjusted, happy family.
CHAPTER 2
Privileged Youth
Youth [is] not a time of life but a state of mind . . . a predominance of courage over timidity, of the appetite for adventure over the love of ease.
— Robert F. Kennedy (1966), borrowing from Samuel Ullman, “Youth” (1934)
AS HE GREW UP, Jack Kennedy ca
JACK’S FIRST MEMORIES from 1922-23 were associated with the Naples Road house and attendance at the local public school, Edward Devotion. In 1924, Joe Jr., now nine, and Jack, age seven, were sent to a local private school, Dexter, where—unlike Devotion, which had shorter hours—they would be supervised from 8:15 in the morning until 4:45 in the afternoon. This schedule freed Rose to give more attention to Rosemary, whose retardation mandated home tutoring. The boy’s mother also saw Dexter as a guard against the mischief—the “state of quixotic disgrace,” she called it—for which Joe Jr. and Jack had an obvious affinity. To their father, Dexter, the successor to the discontinued lower school of the prestigious Noble and Greenough School, would bring his sons together with their Beacon Hill counterparts, the offspring of Social Register families such as the Storrows, Saltonstalls, and Bundys.
Jack’s first ten years were filled with memories of Grandpa Fitz taking him and Joe Jr. to Red Sox games, boating in Boston’s Public Garden, or on the campaign circuit around Boston in 1922, when the old man made a failed bid for governor. There were also the childhood illnesses from bronchitis, chicken pox, German measles, measles, mumps, scarlet fever, and whooping cough that confined him to bed, where he learned the pleasure of being read to by Rose or reading on his own about the adventures of Sinbad the Sailor, Peter Pan, and Black Beauty. His favorites were Billy Whiskers—the escapades of a billy goat that traveled the world and “which Jack found vastly interesting”—and Reddy Fox, one of various animals “mixed up in a series of simple, but . . . exciting adventures.” Jack was also drawn to the stories of adventure and chivalry in Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley novels, to biographies of prominent characters, and to histories, “so long as they had flair, action, and color,” Rose recalled. He read and reread King Arthur and the Round Table.
Young Jack regularly took morning walks with Rose and one or two of his siblings to the local shopping area, the five-and-ten, and the parish church, which Rose explained was not only for Sunday or special holidays but part of a good Catholic’s daily life. And there were the summers away from Boston, first at Cohasset, a Protestant enclave on the South Shore, where the family met a wall of social hostility in 1922, including Joe’s exclusion from membership in the town’s country club, then at the Cape Cod villages of Craigville Beach in 1924 and Hyannis Port, beginning in 1926, both more welcoming. Traveling to the Cape in Joe’s chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce, the Kennedys rented a two-and-a-half-acre estate overlooking the Hyannis Port harbor. There, Jack learned to swim and enjoy the outdoor activities that became a constant in the family’s life.
“It was an easy, prosperous life, supervised by maids and nurses, with more and more younger sisters to boss and to play with,” Jack told his 1960 campaign biographer, James MacGregor Burns. When later asked if anything really bothered him as a child, Jack could only think of his competition with Joe. Their games and roughhousing on the front porch occasionally descended into hostilities that disrupted their strong mutual attachment. “He had a pugnacious personality,” Jack said about his brother. “Later on it smoothed out, but it was a problem in my boyhood.” A young woman Jack dated as a teenager remembered that whenever they were alone, Jack would talk about his brother. “He talked about him all the time: ‘Joe plays football better, Joe dances better, Joe is getting better grades.’ Joe just kind of overshadowed him in everything.”
Joe Jr., bigger and stronger than Jack, bullied him, and fights between the two—often fierce wrestling matches—terrified younger brother Bobby and their sisters. Jack particularly remembered a bicycle race Joe suggested. They sped around the block in opposite directions, meeting head-on in front of their house. Never willing to concede superiority to the other, neither backed off from a collision that left Joe unhurt and Jack nursing twenty-eight stitches. Joe Jr. patiently instructed all his younger siblings in the rules and techniques of various games, except for Jack. A football handoff became an opportunity to slam the ball into Jack’s stomach “and walk away laughing as his younger brother lay doubled up in pain.” Jack, who refused to be intimidated, developed a hit-and-run style of attack, provoking Joe into unsuccessful chases that turned Jack’s flight into a kind of triumph.
But for all the tensions, Jack thought Joe hung the moon. When Joe went to summer camp in 1926, the nine-year-old Jack briefly enjoyed his temporary elevation to eldest sibling. But as Joe Sr. noted, Jack was soon pining for his brother’s return and made his father promise that he could accompany Joe Jr. the following summer. Jack later remembered that there was no one he would “rather have spent an evening or played golf or in fact done anything [with].” Still, a rivalry remained. In November 1929, when Joe Jr. returned home for Thanksgiving from his first term at boarding school, Jack took special pleasure in recording his triumphs over his dominant brother. “When Joe came home he was telling me how strong he was and how tough,” Jack wrote their father. “The first thing he did to show me how tough he was was to get sick so that he could not have any Thanksgiving dinner. Manly youth. He was then going to show me how to Indian wrestle. I then threw him over on his neck.” Jack also crowed over the paddling the sixth formers (the seniors) at the school gave Joe, who “was all blisters. . . . What I wouldn’t have given to be a sixth former.”
The backdrop for all this was no longer Brookline. In September 1927, when Jack was ten, the family had moved to Riverdale, New York, a rural Bronx suburb of Manhattan. Joe had become a force in the film industry, and his ventures took him between New York and Los Angeles, so there were sensible business reasons for the relocation.
But Joe’s frustration with Boston’s social barriers had as much to do with the move to New York as convenience. Boston “was no place to bring up Irish Catholic children,” Joe later told a reporter. “I didn’t want them to go through what I had to go through when I was growing up there.” But unwilling to completely sever ties to the region that both he and Rose cherished, Joe bought the Hyannis Port estate they had been renting, ensuring that the family would continue to spend its summers on the Cape.
The move to New York was not without strain. Despite being transported in a private railway car and moving into a thirteen-room house previously owned by former Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes in a lovely wooded area overlooking the Hudson River, Rose remembered the change as “a blow in the stomach. For months I would wake up in our new house in New York and feel a terrible sense of loss.” Her distance from familiar surroundings, friends, and family made for a painful transition. The ancestors in the North End tenements would have puzzled over her hardship. A second move in 1929 into a mansion on six acres in the village community of Bronxville, a few miles north of Riverdale, where the average per capita income of its few thousand residents was among the highest in the country, was more to Rose’s liking.
Jack had quickly settled into the private Riverdale Country Day School, where he excelled in his studies in the fourth and fifth grades. In the sixth grade, however, when Joe Jr. went to the Choate boarding school in Wallingford, Connecticut, Jack’s work suffe
Although attending a boarding school marked Jack as a privileged child, he did not appreciate being sent so far away from home. (It would not be the last time Jack felt the burdens of privilege.) “It’s a pretty good place,” he wrote a relative, and “the swimming pool is great,” but he saw little else to recommend the school. He was “pretty homesick the first night” and at other times thereafter. The football team looked “pretty bad.” Worse, “you have a whole lot of religion and the studies are pretty hard. The only time you can get out of here is to see the Harvard-Yale and the Army-Yale [games]. This place is freezing at night and pretty cold in the daytime.” His attendance at chapel every morning and evening would make him “quite pius [sic] I guess when I get home,” he grudgingly told Rose. He also had his share of problems with his classes. English, math, and history were fine, but he struggled with science and especially Latin, which drove his average down to a 77. “In fact his average should be well in the 80’s,” the headmaster recorded. Jack admitted to his mother that he was “doing a little worrying about my studies because what he [the headmaster] said about me starting of[f] great and then going down sunk in.”