by David Nasaw
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Kennedy’s final assignment at Fore River was to manage, as best he could, the influenza epidemic that hit Boston with sudden and deadly effect in the fall of 1918. On September 6, the Boston Daily Globe reported that the epidemic had begun to spread from sailors and soldiers to the civilian population. Eleven days later, it declared that the city was in the vortex of a “grippe epidemic.” City officials closed the theaters and dance halls, forbade public gatherings, and advised churchgoers to remain home on Sundays. By September 21, more than two thousand cases of influenza had been reported at Fore River and Squantum alone. Kennedy was given the task of converting shipyard dormitories into infirmaries in the hope that isolating the sick might help stop the spread of further contagion. He spent days at a time at Fore River, unable and perhaps, given the fear of spreading contagion, unwilling to return to his wife and three children in Brookline. He was not worried for Joseph Jr., who was impossibly healthy and had always been so, but he feared for the health of John Fitzgerald, who had been sickly since birth, and his first daughter, Rose Marie (or Rosemary, as she would later be known), who was born on September 13, 1918, in the midst of the epidemic crisis. “She was,” her mother remembered, “a very pretty baby and she was sweet and peaceable and cried less than the first two had, which at the time I supposed was part of her being a girl.”17
Kennedy and his family would survive the epidemic intact, though according to Rose, the pressures on her husband were so great that he developed an ulcer, the first manifestation of the stress-induced stomach problems that would plague him all his life.
In late October, the epidemic crested. And that was good news. A month later, the war was over. In Quincy, the coming of peace was marked by a parade of fifteen thousand workmen carrying “shovels, picks and other tools,” marching behind the Fore River Band from the plant to the city square. Kennedy was not among them. He had collapsed earlier, from overwork, lack of sleep, and stomach pains, and been sent away to recuperate at a “health farm.”18
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It was a different Fore River that Kennedy returned to after his convalescence. The months of feverish activity, the ceaseless construction of new roads, bridges, and dormitories, the nonstop expansion of plant and workforce: all this was over. Much of the work that remained was on government contracts signed during the war. No one knew what would happen when these were fulfilled and the ships currently under construction were sent to sea. Kennedy remained at Fore River through the winter and the spring of 1919, waiting for a new assignment. But none was forthcoming. The boom in shipbuilding did not survive the coming of peace. Bethlehem shifted its focus away from Fore River, Squantum, and shipbuilding in general and back to its core business, steel.
On June 30, 1919, bowing to the inevitable and, no doubt, both restless and anxious to move on after twenty months in the same place, Joseph P. Kennedy, assistant general manager, tendered his resignation.
Five
MAKING A MILLION
As an Irish Catholic from East Boston, Kennedy had always known that he would have to forge his own path into Boston business and banking circles. He chose his mentors carefully, suffering no fools along the way. His first and most important contact may have been Guy Currier, a former Massachusetts legislator who had studied law, gone into business, and made a fortune for himself as lawyer, lobbyist, and liaison between businessmen and legislators. It was Currier who introduced Kennedy to the Fore River executives who hired him as assistant general manager and probably to Galen Stone, his next employer.1
Stone was the co-owner, with Charles Hayden, of a brokerage firm with offices in Boston and New York. Hayden, Stone was a relatively small player in Boston finance, with nowhere near the assets or the influence of Kidder, Peabody or Lee, Higginson. Still, Galen Stone knew everyone who was anyone in Boston and in New York, served on dozens of boards, and appeared to be both well liked and well respected as a broker.
Kennedy accepted a position as manager of the brokerage department at the firm’s Boston office. Though a newcomer to the business, Kennedy had been investing in stocks on a fairly large scale since graduating from Harvard, perhaps even before. He had an account at Richardson, Hill & Co., one of the more prestigious Boston houses, through which he bought and sold the stocks of companies he had some connection with or some insider knowledge of: Massachusetts Electric, of which he was a trustee; Shawmut National Bank, where his former classmate Bob Potter was an officer; Fairbanks Company, where one of his banking mentors, Eugene Thayer, president of the Merchants Bank of Boston, was a director; and Waldorf System, a company that ran lunchrooms like the one he operated at Fore River.
While employed by Hayden, Stone, he continued, as he had since graduation, to make money on the side by buying and selling real estate through Old Colony Realty and a new entity, Fenway Building Trust, which he had set up with Eddie Moore, his father-in-law’s former secretary, who had also worked for Honey Fitz’s successors, mayors James M. Curley and Andrew Peters. Kennedy owned 98 percent of the new company, Moore 1 percent, and a third investor the remaining 1 percent. Through a complicated set of arrangements, Moore had become the agent for two women who owned property in Boston. The women sold their holdings to Fenway Building Trust and received “notes” in return, which somehow or other found their way back to Kennedy and Moore, who used them to secure bank loans to buy more real estate and stock. It was, at base, a shell game of sorts, but a legal, profitable one.2
This was Kennedy’s first business transaction with Edward Moore, who would become his best friend, constant companion, and most trusted partner in business and politics. Moore and Kennedy had worked together—on selected deals and projects—at Fore River. Sometime in the early 1920s, as Kennedy’s outside business interests grew, he hired Moore as his full-time adviser, secretary, and chief of staff. “Joe,” his wife, Rose, later recalled, “had a rugged individualist’s need for privacy; there were very few men he liked, trusted, and could relax with entirely. . . . Eddie Moore became his closest friend, someone he trusted implicitly in every way and in all circumstances. His wife, Mary, became an equally great friend, confidante, and unfailing support for me. They were older than Joe and I, and we felt the full affection and confidence and unquestioning mutual acceptance that might be felt of a beloved aunt and uncle. They had no children; so they turned to ours” and became surrogate parents to all of them. “When our ninth child, and fourth son, was born, we named him Edward Moore Kennedy.”3
Eddie Moore was the perfect complement to Joe. He respected him, followed his instructions, kept his mouth shut, appeared to enjoy playing second fiddle, and got the job done. The two would work together in Boston, Hollywood, New York, Washington, and London for the next thirty years. Wherever Kennedy would set up headquarters, there was an office for Moore. Moore was genial, placid, dignified, never lost his temper, never glowered or frowned, and was universally adored by those who came into contact or did business with him. Unlike Kennedy, who was imposing, handsome, and tall, Eddie was rather small, nearly bald, and entirely nondescript looking. Gloria Swanson, who didn’t get along with many of the men in the Kennedy entourage, adored Eddie. “Slender, blue-eyed, and gentle, he had a very dry humor, which he employed only rarely and when he was certain of achieving the proper effect with it. He was Mr. Kennedy’s chief brain, his auxiliary memory. He kept track of everything that went on.”4
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Joseph Kennedy’s appointment at Hayden, Stone in June 1919 solidified his identification with the Boston business community. He lived in a suburb, dressed in tailored suits, wore custom-made shirts, and drove to the office instead of taking the streetcar. He gave up baseball for golf and in the summer of 1919, simultaneously with accepting his new position, joined the Woodland Golf Club in nearby Auburndale. In September 1919, when 1,117 of Boston’s 1,544 policemen went out on strike, Kennedy publicly supported Republican governor Calvin Coolidge’s de
cision to call out the militia and signed a solicitation for funds to assist the strikebreakers.
The largely Irish police force had voted to join the American Federation of Labor and been granted a charter in August. The Brahmin, Harvard-educated, “proper Bostonian” police commissioner appointed by the governor immediately suspended the union organizers. When the policemen threatened a strike if their leaders were disciplined, the commissioner called for volunteers to replace them. Large numbers of Harvard students stepped forward as potential strikebreakers. Democratic mayor Andrew Peters was in favor of negotiating a settlement with the policemen, but he was overruled by Coolidge. Kennedy, instead of staying silent or supporting the policemen and the Democratic mayor, allied himself firmly with Governor Coolidge, Guy Currier, Harvard president Abbott Lowell, and the rest of the blue bloods and Republicans who cheered on as the strike was broken, the policemen fired, and “order” restored.
That fall, Kennedy continued his move toward respectability by filling out an application for membership in the Middlesex Club, the oldest Republican club in New England. When, only weeks after he had filled out his application, Governor Coolidge removed an Irish American as clerk of the court in East Boston and replaced him with a Protestant, Kennedy abandoned any further thought of becoming a Republican. “People like myself,” he wrote the club president, Louis Coolidge, “must be made to feel that there is a chance in the Republican party to at least see that Irish-Catholics are not discriminated against just because they are Irish-Catholics.”5
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On February 20, 1920, Kathleen Kennedy, like her brother Jack and sister Rosemary before her, was born in the twin bed nearest the window in the upstairs master bedroom at Beals Street. Kennedy was not there for these births, as he would not be for the five that would follow. “The idea,” Rose recalled with a bit of pride in her tone, “was [that giving birth] was something the woman had to do and the less bother she gave to anybody else including her husband the better it was, and the easier it was.”6
Joseph P. Kennedy was a good father and a caring one, but he had seen little of his family during his years at Fore River. “He was under such pressure,” Rose recalled, “that, except for Sundays, he came home just long enough to sleep.” That pattern did not change significantly with the end of the war and his first year at Hayden, Stone.
Only days after Kathleen’s birth, Jack, three months shy of his third birthday, was diagnosed with scarlet fever. He had been sickly since birth and “always thin,” dangerously so, Rose thought. At dinner, she would always make sure that he was given “the extra juice from the steak when it was carved. . . . I had to build up his health.” Jack had been feeling poorly for a few days when the doctors made the diagnosis of scarlet fever, which, Rose recalled in her memoirs, “was a dreaded disease, fairly often fatal, quite often crippling in aftereffects; heart, eyes, ears; there were various possibilities that were awful to think about. . . . And with that very contagious disease in that small house on Beals Street, there were fears that Joe, Jr. and Rosemary would get it, and that the new baby might also, and so might I. And yet there was no place in Brookline where Jack could be taken—the [local] hospital wouldn’t admit patients with contagious diseases.”7
The first imperative was to get Jack out of the house. But where? The Boston City Hospital had a special unit, the South Department, for infectious childhood diseases, and the physician in charge, Dr. Edward Place, was the nation’s leading expert on measles and scarlet fever. The problem was that the Kennedys lived in the city of Brookline, not in Boston. Either through Honey Fitz or other contacts, Kennedy got in touch with Democratic mayor Andrew Peters, who arranged for Jack Kennedy, though not a Boston resident, to be admitted to Boston City Hospital.
“By the time he got there,” Rose recalled, “Jack was a very, very sick little boy.” Because Rose was adhering to her usual and prescribed regimen of remaining in bed for three weeks after childbirth, watched over by her own nurse, Kennedy took over the care of his dangerously ill second son. For the next two months, he rose earlier than usual, went to Mass, then to his Hayden, Stone office, then to the hospital, where he spent the late afternoon and evening at Jack’s bedside.
He was devastated by his son’s illness but suffered silently, never complaining or sharing his fears with anyone, certainly not with Rose. Only when it became clear that Jack was going to recover did he acknowledge his pain. Thanking Dr. Place “for your wonderful work for Jack during his recent illness,” he confessed that he “had never experienced any serious sickness in my family previous to this case of Jack’s, and I little realized what an effect such a happening could possibly have on me. During the darkest days I felt that nothing else mattered except his recovery.”8
While his son was in the hospital, Kennedy had pledged to himself that if Jack was spared, he would give half his fortune to the church. When his son did recover, he made out a check for $3,740 (equivalent to more than $47,000 today), half of his liquid assets, to the Guild of Saint Apollonia, which had been organized in 1914 to provide free dental care to Boston’s Catholic school children.9
On being discharged from Boston City Hospital, Jack, accompanied by a full-time nurse, was driven to Mansion House, a resort hotel in Poland Spring, Maine. Dr. Place had found “abundant clinical evidence” that contagion could “persist . . . for many weeks, as long as twenty at least,” and the Kennedys, with three children under five at home, were taking no chances. Jack did not return to Brookline until his third birthday, some three months after he had been taken away. During this entire period, it was his father, not his mother, who visited him, cared for him, and watched over his recovery.10
Jack Kennedy would spend the rest of his life suffering from one malady after another, whooping cough, measles, chicken pox, colds and coughs, unexplained fevers. “His father was heartbroken at different times, when [Jack] was ill [but] he was with him. He went to the doctors, he made the decisions or he gave him the advice or he decided what he would do or where he would go.” With each illness, accident, operation, and convalescence, the bond between father and son grew stronger and more resilient. Rose was left out of the loop because, she thought, her husband did not want to upset her and doubted she would have anything useful to add to the discussion. “A good many times I was not consulted . . . because I didn’t know enough of all the circumstances and I was busy with the other children. We had eight other children to consider so we each had our own particular sort of department.”11
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In mid-March 1920, a month after Kathleen’s birth and during Jack’s convalescence in Maine, the Kennedys sold their Beals Street house to Eddie Moore and his wife and moved into a new one at the corner of Abbottsford and Naples roads in one of the wealthier sections of Brookline. Their Beals Street house was large, but not large enough for four children and three full-time servants. It was also situated in one of the lower-middle-class neighborhoods in Brookline, where the majority of families rented rather than owned their homes. The new home was, appropriately enough for Kennedy’s status as a broker with Hayden, Stone, older, more elegant, and, with twelve rooms on one acre, much larger. It was, in fact, almost “reminiscent of Rose’s girlhood home on Welles Avenue in Dorchester. . . . Designed in the Queen Anne Style that was fashionable in the late nineteenth century . . . the architecture incorporated turrets, tall chimneys, decorative windows and numerous varied decorative architectural elements, which mimicked in an abstract way a small castle.” It cost $16,000, more than double what Kennedy had paid for the one on Beals Street.12
Kennedy could afford it, though barely. He was making $10,000 a year, a 150 percent increase from the $4,000 he had been paid as assistant general manager at Fore River, but he needed more, not just to provide for his growing household, but to prove to himself and his wife, family, friends, and ever-present father-in-law that the great expectations placed on him were justified. In East Bosto
n, he was still P.J.’s boy; everywhere else he was known as Honey Fitz’s son-in-law. He had taken the position at Hayden, Stone not because he wanted to spend his life trading stocks, but because it was the only one offered him. The big money, he knew, was not in brokerage per se, but in assisting businessmen in financing start-ups, expansions, and mergers, then managing their stock and/or their companies from the inside. This was the path Charles Hayden and Galen Stone had taken to becoming millionaires. In Kennedy’s first twelve months at the firm, they and their associates had organized financing and floated new issues of stocks or bonds for sugar refiners, mining and petroleum corporations, and a few utilities. Kennedy had not been invited to take part in any of these deals for the simple reason that he knew neither the corporate executives nor the industries involved. If he was to succeed at Hayden, Stone or elsewhere, he would have to demonstrate a thorough understanding of an emerging business sector that none of the officers in the Boston banks or brokerage houses were paying attention to. Fortunately, there was such a sector—and it was thriving.
