The Kennedys

by Thomas Maier

  From his room inside the Hotel Bellevue, Jack and his band of Boston Irish political advisers worried that his family might be appearing a bit too Anglophile. With his usual wit, Jack wrote a note addressed “Dear Family” and began, “Just a question to ask whether you’re all with me.” He cited newspaper accounts about Rose Kennedy and Lady Astor appearing together, a photograph of Kick identified as “Lady Hartington” and a speech by his father suggesting that the United States forgive its British loans.

  “Let’s not forget,” Jack reminded them, “

  1.That they read the papers here.

  2.That I’m running for Congress, not Parliament.”

  From the other side of the Atlantic, Kick cheered when she learned Jack had won the election. In a letter to her brother, Kick gushed “how terrifically pleased I am for you. Everyone says you were so good in the election and the outcome must have been a great source of satisfaction.”With the wry sense of humor they both shared, Kick alluded to her brother’s pro- Irish views in the congressional race in Boston and how that perception was so different abroad. Somehow, Jack managed to benefit from people’s perceptions of him, regardless of the reality. “Gee, aren’t you lucky?” she wrote a month after his victory. “The folks here think you are madly pro- British so don’t start destroying that illusion until I get my house fixed. The painters might just not like your attitude!”

  ENGLAND WAS A pleasant memory for the rest of the Kennedys, but for Kathleen, the war-battered nation became a permanent home. During her brief stays in Massachusetts, Kick felt a distance from her mother, as though Rose could not bring herself to forgive or forget her daughter’s marriage into a family with such an anti–Irish Catholic history. Despite her vaunted faith, Rose could not overcome her daughter’s actions, and England became a spiritual refuge for Kick as much as a place to live. After Billy’s death, Kick seemed committed to returning to her religion, hoping to please her parents.“ Dearest Mother,” she wrote home in one letter,“You will be glad to hear that I am writing this from the convent where I have been for the last two days making the annual retreat.” At this religious gathering for British Catholics—a small but active band of converts and born believers in London—Kick enjoyed the company of her friend and fellow Catholic, Sissy Ormsby-Gore. “As the weather has been amazingly warm and convents are so peaceful and tranquil I depart tomorrow feeling blessed in both body and soul,” Kick told her parents. To her brother Jack, she acknowledged her difficulties. “How are Pa and Ma? I hope they are better,” she wrote a few months later.“Since my short trip to the convent things somehow look much better.”

  Though she was busy reestablishing her relationship with her family and the church, Kathleen learned to cast a wary eye on the Irish. Her stays at Lismore Castle were relaxing (“a peaceful atmosphere which Mother would love”), but her hectic trips up to Dublin gave her the chance to observe Ireland close up. “The Irish certainly can go wild,” she observed after attending a few parties on the small island called Ireland’s Eye, a bit north of the capital. A friend of her father’s took her to the racetrack, where she was introduced to “all the government people, who by the way all look like gunmen, as ‘Joe Kennedy’s daughter.’” When Jack visited briefly in 1945, he mentioned the possibility of buying an Irish thoroughbred as a gift for their father to run at the Hialeah track in Florida. The historic struggle between the Irish and the British, so much a part of her own family history, held little meaning for Kick except in the most personal terms. After staying with family friends at the U.S. embassy at Phoenix Park, Kick learned that the residence had been the site where Billy’s relative died many years earlier when he was assassinated by knife-wielding pro-IRA men. “Another thing which I didn’t know about this house then,” she wrote.“Lord Frederick Cavendish, Billy’s great, great uncle, was brought in here, dying, when shot [sic] by Irish patriots in 1882.” The thought of political assassination by Irish terrorists, no matter what Grandpa Fitz’s views, was repugnant to Lady Hartington.

  In her letters home, Kick tried to maintain a girlish quality in her voice, never letting on to her parents about the complexities of her personal life. Lonely and at times despondent, Kick contemplated marriage to Richard Wood, scion of the politically connected Halifax family, who owned their own huge estates in England and Ireland; but again, there were nettlesome questions of a mixed marriage to a Protestant. Wood received a large catechism text, Apologetics and Catholic Doctrine, and, like a schoolboy, dutifully studied at Kathleen’s request. The book, published in Dublin and popular among many young Catholics, was written in understandable yet devout terms by Archbishop Michael Sheehan, an Oxford-educated priest born in Waterford who also favored a return to Gaelic in Irish life. Sheehan’s aim was virtually the same as Rose Kennedy’s intent—“not only to teach children religion but also to teach them to be religious; not only to teach them what they must believe and do in order to be saved, but also to help them love Our Lord and Saviour with a great, personal love, and to love the Church he founded.” Whether Sheehan’s book was given to her by Father D’Arcy, sent by her mother or obtained on her own, its presence underscored Kick’s intent to make some rectification with her church, even if the realities of her own life fought against it. Unlike Billy, Richard Wood told her that he wouldn’t object to their children growing up as Catholics if they married. Wood couldn’t accept some central mysteries of the church, however, such as the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary and the infallibility of the pontiff. “But that’s what I was taught,” Kick insisted. For whatever reasons, her talk of marriage to Wood ended soon after she met a married man, Peter Fitzwilliam.

  Her attraction to the Earl of Fitzwilliam, a dashing older man of thirty-seven with a commanding presence and an alcoholic wife, would soon prove overwhelming. She flung herself into a deeply passionate love affair for perhaps the first time in her life. A handful of friends in Britain who learned of her secret trysts with Fitzwilliam tried to dissuade her, some because of Peter’s superficial nature, and others, among them Sissy Ormsby- Gore, because of the renewed religious conflict such a marriage would portend. Kick didn’t breathe a word of the affair to her family, not even when her mother and sister Patricia visited Lismore Castle. She would wait to tell Jack when he arrived in Ireland late that summer in 1947. If anyone would understand, it would be her brother.

  The cost of being Irish was sometimes more than Jack Kennedy could bear. During the 1946 campaign, he resisted wearing the fedoras pushed on his head by Joe Kane, making an allowance only once, quite briefly, at a parade where he knew he’d see his mother, who also favored the old-fogey chapeaux worn by every Irish Catholic male in Boston of a certain age. At a St. Patrick’s Day celebration, Jack donned a fedora as he passed Rose in the parade, then quickly ditched it. A more troublesome price of Irish politics in Boston came due in the matter of a man who seemed born to wear a fedora—James Michael Curley, the imprisoned mayor, whose yes-men and lickspittle roused enough political support to circulate a petition for a presidential pardon, some kind of amnesty that would spring the Purple Shamrock from his jail cell. When John McCormack, the head of the congressional delegation and an old Curley supporter, brought it up on the House floor with the new congressman, Kennedy looked nauseated. “Has anyone talked with the President or anything?” Kennedy asked. McCormack, irked by his response, told him curtly that he didn’t have to sign the petition if he didn’t want.

  Kennedy, though barely more than a beginner in Boston politics, knew that his failure to sign the petition would have serious consequences. Curley, for all his shenanigans, reflected much of the Irish Catholic experience in Boston: hardscrabble, tough, ambitious, clannish and keenly aware of slights from Brahmins and those who would look down their noses at the Irish. His lifelong dream, to be appointed by FDR as the American representative to the Vatican, was short-circuited because he was a Catholic at a time when only a Protestant would do. Sitting in Danbury federal prison, he stewed about the
dead president he had once helped elect.“Am enclosing a clipping about another victim of FDR,” he wrote a friend. “This list of victims of his sadistic tendencies continues to grow, and strange to relate all are Irish Catholics, Smith, Farley, Kennedy, Kelly, Nash, Hague,Walker, Walsh, Curley and others.” More than 100,000 Bostonians petitioned President Truman to grant clemency to their hero, who claimed to be too ill for incarceration. Old Joe urged his son to come to the aid of the embattled mayor, reminding him that Curley had given up the seat Jack now occupied. Archbishop Cushing also urged compassion. But Jack, claiming to have checked out Curley’s health problem and found it phony,was the only one in the Massachusetts delegation to refuse. Though his young supporters viewed Kennedy’s decision as the idealistic mark of a new leader, it could very well have been an old-score settling for the family, a payback for Curley’s part in sabotaging Honey Fitz’s political career years earlier. By late summer 1947, with the Curley issue still heating up, Jack Kennedy was ready to escape by taking a long junket to Ireland.

  For her brother’s arrival, Kathleen made sure that Lismore Castle was filled with vivacious and interesting people. As she later recalled for her father,“I have never enjoyed a month so much and I think Jack has enjoyed it too.” Anthony Eden, the dashing war hero and foreign minister during Churchill’s Conservative government, “arrived loaded down with official-looking” documents but soon “got into the Irish spirit,” and made fast friends with Jack. Sir Shane Leslie, a writer and a cousin of Winston Churchill’s who converted to Catholicism and became an Irish nationalist, stayed for a time, and so did old friends—Tony Rosslyn, a member of Parliament, and the playwright William Douglas-Home, who had dated Kick before the war. With its lush accommodations and lively conversations, Lismore became a summer idyll—“one of the loveliest spots in the world”—for the two young Kennedys. “The newspapers never arrive, the telephone can barely work so it doesn’t take long to get into the real old Irish atmosphere,” Kick wrote home. “I could really spend six months of the year. Daddy, you simply must come next year.”

  Despite his ailing back, Jack couldn’t keep still. As part of his congressional trip, Jack intended to investigate economic conditions, and met for an hour in Dublin with De Valera to discuss the Irish economy. On this trip north, he also visited a familiar haunt—Mulligan’s on Poolbeg Street, where he had pushed back a creamy pint or two during his visit as a Hearst columnist in 1945. He’d first read of the musty old pub in James Joyce’s Dubliners, and he had enjoyed its dark corners and the animated conversation of fellow journalists and the actors from the Theater Royal nearby. Jack Kennedy’s interest in Irish lore also extended to the origins of his own family. Before he left America, he consulted his father’s sister, Loretta Kennedy Connelly, in preparation for a visit to the Kennedy Homestead in Dunganstown, County Wexford. Back in the 1920s,Aunt Loretta, the family historian on the Kennedy side, had accompanied Jack’s grandfather, P. J. Kennedy, when he visited relations in the old country, and she never forgot the trip. With a letter of introduction from Aunt Loretta, who was also his godmother, in his pocket, Jack set out one day to find his Irish cousins, whom he called “the original Kennedys.”

  AT FIRST, the drive in Kathleen’s shining new American-made station wagon didn’t seem that bad as Jack and a friend cruised from Lismore through Waterford and into New Ross, the river port city where his great- grandfather had left with hopes of landing in America. Kick and her aristocratic friends thought Jack was crazy. They preferred to hit golf balls on a nearby course that wasn’t very well manicured but was good enough to wile away some free time. With his bad back, Jack couldn’t swing a club easily and, besides, he had harbored thoughts of this journey for a long time. “I researched before I came over where the original Kennedys come from,” he explained before leaving.“And it’s not so far away, only about one hundred miles or so. And I’d like to go.” He convinced one of Kick’s friends, Pamela Churchill, a beautiful woman recently divorced from the former prime minister’s son, to come along for the ride. As they turned south from New Ross, the unpaved roads became muddier and narrower, barely wide enough for one car to pass, let alone two. After consulting Aunt Loretta’s directions, Jack still couldn’t find his way through Dunganstown, and rolled down his window when he came upon a passerby, an older man named Robert Burrell.

  The American in the car inquired where the “Kennedy” family might live. Burrell paused, thought for a moment, and then sent the traveler and his companion to the only place he knew with a Kennedy name—the farm of James Kennedy, about a half mile from the original Kennedy Homestead. They pulled up to a farm not far from the banks of the River Barrow, and were met by James Kennedy, his wife, Kitty, and their children, including a spry, red-headed eight-year-old son, Patrick, who had been working in the fields. All were a bit soiled that day from their work. Wearing casual clothes, as if on a college outing, Jack introduced himself as a Kennedy cousin from America and began almost immediately asking questions about their family heritage. “He was very thin and tall,” remembered Patrick, more than five decades later.“He had a camera and he took our picture. Unfortunately, we didn’t have a camera.” Kitty prepared a cup of tea for their visitors, and they chatted for nearly an hour with the young man who, unpretentiously, mentioned his important job back in America. As they chatted, Jack realized his error. When he stopped the passerby, “he asked for the name ‘Kennedy’ and we were the only ones with the same name,” explained Patrick Kennedy. And so James Kennedy, ever gracious to his appreciative American cousin, escorted the congressman to the old family homestead where his great-grandfather had once lived.

  Jack’s mistake was easy enough to make. In the years since 1888—when Patrick Kennedy’s brothers successfully fought their eviction from the family homestead with the help of their American cousin, P. J. Kennedy—the thirty-acre Kennedy Homestead had become known as the Ryan place. During these years, Patrick’s two brothers, James and John, had managed to resist eviction from the British landlord, Colonel Tottenham. Eventually they gained back rights to the property in the early twentieth century, which was passed down to the next generation of Kennedys. Several of the Kennedy cousins remained unmarried, and some emigrated to America. Ownership of the Kennedy Homestead wound up in the hands of second cousins, James Ryan and Mary Kennedy Ryan, a married couple who both had family ties to the original Kennedy owners. A man with a receding hairline and some features similar to those of his millionaire American cousin, James Ryan was the grandson of John Kennedy, the oldest brother of Patrick Kennedy, who had emigrated to Boston. His wife, Mary Kennedy Ryan, was the granddaughter of James Kennedy, Patrick’s other brother, who also remained in Eire during the Famine. When Jack Kennedy arrived that sunny late summer day in 1947—nearly a hundred years to the day after his great-grandfather had left the farm for America—it was his cousin, Mary Kennedy Ryan, who came to the door.

  “I’m John Kennedy from Massachusetts,” he said, almost apologetically. “I believe we are related.”

  Mary Ryan, an ever practical woman, thoroughly eyed the stranger up and down, and cast an even more dubious gaze at the well-dressed British woman in his company before deciding whether to bother her husband, James Ryan, who was tending the fields beyond. If it weren’t for the presence of her nearby cousin, James, she might have shown even more skepticism. But Mary Ryan did the Christian thing, welcoming her uninvited guests into her small farmhouse, and beckoned her husband. For the next two hours, while sipping more tea, Jack learned about the Kennedys who stayed in Ireland.

  NEVER BEFORE had the long journey of the Irish diaspora seem so real, so personal, to Jack Kennedy than during this visit to the modest, almost primitive farm still toiled by his Kennedy cousins. Instead of a massive summer house by the shore in Hyannis and a winter place in Palm Beach with its own swimming pool, the home of these Kennedys was a simple whitewashed stone house with a thatched roof. Without electricity, most chores were performed manually. The
barn sheltered five or six cows, a few pigs, three horses for the field and a pony to pull a wooden cart carrying bags of barley to market in New Ross. Though hardly an agricultural combine, the Kennedy Homestead, with its barnyard smells and Irish authenticity, exuded a distinct charm in Jack’s eyes. He had found what he came looking for. Just how much was revealed about his family’s history in Ireland is unclear.

  At age forty-eight, Mary Kennedy Ryan looked very much like the hardworking farmer’s wife that she was. She ruled a household made up of three young children—two daughters and a younger son, all under the age of ten. Her matronly clothes and her corpulent, bosomy figure suggested a gentle nature, but her wide,muscular hands and tough, determined stare stated otherwise. Indeed, as a young adult, Mary Kennedy had been a devoted and active member of the Irish Republican Army’s women’s auxiliary organization known as the Cumann na mBan, and had secretly carried guns and other weapons. With every bit of her fiber, Mary Kennedy Ryan despised the British oppression of her country and its crushing effect on her family. Two decades earlier, she and her husband had taken considerable risks for Ireland’s independence and in the resulting civil war.“The IRA was her god,” recalled Mary Ann Ryan, her eldest surviving daughter. “It never dissipated in my mother. She took that feeling to the grave with her.”

  The Kennedy family had supported the Republican cause for several generations, long before Mary Kennedy Ryan and her husband came along, stirred by their own unjust treatment from the British. Her uncle, James Kennedy,went to jail over the land eviction in the 1880s and barely managed to hold on to the farm. That indignity was not soon forgotten. “Mary Ryan was very aware of the way the British treated the Irish here,” said her cousin, Patrick Kennedy, who tagged along as a boy in 1947 with his father, James, when they accompanied JFK to the family homestead. Both he and Mary Ryan’s children attended St. Bridget’s Church in Ballykelly, the same parish where JFK’s great-grandfather, Patrick Kennedy, likely attended classes, at least for a few years, despite the provisions preventing Catholics from gaining an education. “I’m sure that the feeling (against the British) stretched back to Patrick Kennedy and his time,” said his great-grandnephew, sitting in the kitchen of the old homestead many years later.