Yet it wasn’t the banishment from Boston alone that forged in the young Bobby such a lasting identification with the way his co-religionists had been overlooked and rejected. There was also a permanent scar left on him by his relationship with his father, which carried a personal experience of rejection. He yearned for Joe’s attention and dreaded his disapproval, much as a faithful subject does with a ruler.
Bobby’s childhood, already difficult, forced upon him the continual challenge of holding his own amid the pack. Once he raced so hard to get to dinner on time, in desperate fear of the senior Kennedy’s wrath, that he smashed his head into a glass wall he thought might prove a shortcut. It left him bleeding. “I was very awkward,” he’d later admit. “I dropped things and fell down all the time.” Once, not yet having learned to swim, he jumped from a boat into Nantucket Sound to force himself to. That at least caught brother Jack’s attention: “It showed either a lot of guts or no sense at all.”
But in the way that families arrange themselves, Bobby, the odd child out, endeared himself to his mother and soon became her favorite. A devout Catholic, she took her third boy, overlooked by his father, to her heart, openly calling him her “pet.” Responding to the emotional space she made for him, he reciprocated by fully accepting Rose Kennedy’s devotion to the Church as his own. He could see that it was a way of making her happy. He would tag along with her to daily mass, not just out of shared piety but also to clearly demonstrate his concern for her—something his brothers decidedly did not. He was “thoughtful and considerate,” his mother saw. “And probably the most religious of my sons.” Also, others would discover, the least assimilated.
The most Irish of the Kennedy children, and always attached to exactly what that meant, it wouldn’t be wrong to say he was, despite being a third-generation American, the least changed from the old country.
Bobby adored his older brothers, even if his desire for their company was one-sided. Joe Jr. and Jack were a world to themselves and kid brothers can, of course, famously be nuisances. At night from his room upstairs, hearing them and envying their closeness, he’d long to be part of them, even when the noise was that of a knockdown fight. It was also about the age gap that lay between them, not to mention the presence in between of sisters Rose Marie (nicknamed “Rosemary”), Kathleen, Eunice, and Pat.
As his older brothers matured and were invited to join their parents for political discussions at dinner, Bobby inevitably was marooned with younger sister Jean and later Teddy, the very youngest, at the “little kids’ table.” “He longed to explore the world with Dad,” Jean has written, “and to engage in debate with Joe and Jack. But when he was a toddler the older boys were already headed into their teenage years.”
Bobby, as we’ve seen, was a decade younger than Joe, eight years behind Jack. By the time he was old enough to imagine being at least tolerated as their companion, his big brothers were already off to boarding school. Thus, they seemed to keep widening their lead on him. According to Jean: “Bobby strove to be as near as possible to Joe and Jack every chance he got, and to be respected by them. At dinner time at the kids’ table off to the side, Bobby strained his ear to their direction and longed to be their equal.” Rose Kennedy, meanwhile, worried at the effect on Bobby of having his adored, if negligent, brothers gone nine months of the year.
Jean remembered how Bobby spent many a Hyannis Port summer playing with local Cape Cod pals of his own. They were the sons of a family maid. “Only looking back,” she added, “does it occur to me how uncommon it was during that time in American history for children of different races to play together.”
One could argue, of course, that I’m overdoing this emphasis on birth order and favorites. But anyone who’s ever experienced the reality of rivalry for parents’ affections while growing up will understand. I know very well that my own four brothers continue to have their own individual perceptions and convictions about the way it played out in our house. I sensed from the beginning I had my mom’s love without effort, it was Dad’s I felt I had to earn. Loving him, and I clearly did, wasn’t enough to accomplish the job. I had to work for it.
Whatever else they were, the Kennedys were such a family, with each member contending for his or her space. Here, as elsewhere, life was unfair. While Bobby could comfort himself with his mother’s love, Jack didn’t have the same experience of Rose’s maternal affection.
Unlike Bobby, Jack kept small regard for his mother. Looking back, he was cold in his dismissal of her, once saying she was, in his upbringing, “a nothing.” She “never really loved him,” Jacqueline Kennedy told author Theodore White a week after Dallas. “She didn’t love him,” she repeated for emphasis. Meanwhile, he kept a guarded distance from his father. Sick much of the time, and relying on books for escape, Jack would discover his own world. “History made him what he was,” his widow believed. “This little boy in bed, so much of the time . . . reading history.” As his sister Jean would put it, he was “funny and original, charting his own path regardless of what others thought.” Thus, he was able to make a refuge for himself, away from family and doctors.
Bobby, we know, wasn’t his brother. He found comfort in Rose’s consoling embrace. When it came to his father, he had to keep making his case. It explains his emerging devotion to justice, if only for survival. To be unfavored, as Bobby was, forces you to put forth your claim based on what’s right. Early on, his family would often hear him speak of what was “fair” and “not fair.” Here he was, with all his family advantages, not yet a teenager, learning the language of the oppressed.
More than his brothers, Bobby clung to the black-and-white strictness of his church’s moral order. For the Kennedys—and, a generation later, for me—Catholic instruction, certainly at the catechism level, was blunt when it came to moral teaching. A page in our religion textbooks—which we opened each day in our first-grade class at Maternity BVM—showed three milk bottles side by side. The white one, we were instructed, represented a person’s soul in the “state of grace,” that is, without sin. The darker bottle replicated a soul that had committed venial, or pardonable, sins. The third bottle was black, indicating mortal sin, which, if not cleansed through the sacrament of confession, meant you were going to hell.
This was Bobby’s world. He was the one who took every bit of this to heart. When the time came, he eagerly became an altar boy. He would now be up there with the priest on Sunday morning, the eyes of the communicants on him and his fellow celebrants. These would be the first hours of his life he would be onstage, in this case a holy place. He was sharing his faith; though his body was small, his soul was now large.
His brothers and sisters would hear him in his room practicing his Latin: Introibo ad altare Dei, ad Deum qui laetificat juventutem meam. “I shall go unto the altar of God, the God who gives joy to my youth.” This was the liturgy of the centuries, spoken in the ancient language of the early Roman Church. It carried with it the aroma of incense and the judgment of the divine. It was hierarchical and mysterious, and it was meant to be as strict in its observance as in its devotion.
Bobby loved it.
Jack and Bobby at U.S. ambassador’s residence, London, 1939.
CHAPTER TWO
AMBASSADOR’S SON
“For the second time in our history, a British Prime Minister has returned from Germany bringing peace with honour.”
—NEVILLE CHAMBERLAIN
Against the wishes of his staunchly Democratic father-in-law—the former Boston mayor, John Fitzgerald—Joseph Kennedy had quietly voted for Herbert Hoover in the 1928 national election. Kennedy was betting the Republican candidate, who’d served as secretary of commerce under the preceding president, Calvin Coolidge, might now continue the prosperity enjoyed during the course of that administration.
The more revealing truth is that Joe Kennedy’s 1928 vote was as much against people like himself as it was for Herbert Hoover. Whatever else might be said about Kennedy, he had disdain for crook
edness, especially in politics, and most especially the Irish kind. He regarded such local political characters as Honey Fitz—his wife’s father—and James Michael Curley not only as corrupt but embarrassing. They reflected badly on his people.
Kennedy lumped Al Smith, Hoover’s opponent, in the same category, unfairly. Recognized as an honest and honorable public official, the New York governor nonetheless spoke in the street-corner language of New York City and when he addressed crowds, threw kisses to supporters as if he were a matinee star. To Kennedy, Smith’s urban accent and lack of reserve made him the type of machine-turned-out pol he found most repellent.
The Crash of 1929—in a way few outsiders could imagine—was afterward viewed by Irish Americans as evidence the Lord, in fact, was looking out for us. Our reasoning went like this: had Smith won the election the year before, he undoubtedly would have had to shoulder the blame for the Great Depression that followed. And by extension, his fault would be ours as well. Had the first of our faith—in this case, Smith—won the election, the victory he’d achieved would have preceded a calamity, and that, too, would have belonged to us. Our first president would have been our last.
Events took a different course. So bleak was the economic outlook by 1932 that even tough businessmen like Joseph P. Kennedy recognized the need for the country to move left. Unless action was taken to stanch the massive economic bleeding, even a revolution might be possible. Just as Kennedy had voted Republican four years before, believing it would keep the country booming, he now was willing to look to a Democrat to keep it from failing. So worried was he in the spring of 1932, he later claimed, he would have given up one half his wealth as long as he could be sure of keeping the other.
He looked upon the new governor of New York, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, as that insurance policy. “I was really worried,” Joe would later tell a Boston reporter. “I knew that big, drastic changes had to be made in our system and I felt that Roosevelt was the one who could make those changes. I wanted him in the White House for my own security.”
So it was that he began enthusiastically drumbeating as an open supporter of the Democratic candidate. It wasn’t only about the economy. He also viewed the patrician Roosevelt as the president most likely to present a responsive face to the American groups for so long shut out, the largest of whom were the Catholics. To Joe Kennedy, FDR loomed as a door opener.
His most effective maneuvering on behalf of Roosevelt’s nomination took place behind the scenes. When his candidate failed to win the necessary two thirds’ support on the first ballot at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago that summer, Kennedy quickly saw what he might do to remedy the situation. He went to his pal William Randolph Hearst, the press baron whose chain included newspapers in San Francisco and Los Angeles that had great influence over the California delegation. Hearst was backing Speaker of the House John Nance Garner for president. Kennedy now convinced him that his man had no chance and should instead throw his delegates to Roosevelt. To return the favor, FDR picked Garner as his running mate.
For what he’d so critically helped deliver, Joe Kennedy expected in return a swift and sizable patronage reward. Yet for months, throughout the whole of 1933, the new president held back, keeping him at bay, aware of his recent ally’s impatience but ignoring it. The fast-buck men of Wall Street had brought on the Crash. Why welcome one of its most notorious figures into the new government?
It wasn’t until the spring of 1934 that President Roosevelt relented. With his administration seen as moving leftward, he needed to signal balance by bringing on board a well-recognized symbol of Big Money and political moderation. The job he was offering to Kennedy was to be envoy to Ireland, which by then had gained a limited autonomy. For Joe it was a negligible posting, one hardly matching his ambitions. He refused it cold.
Not long after, however, a far better employment proposal was put on the table for Joe to consider. In 1934 Roosevelt had just created a federal body to regulate the stock market, to be called the Securities and Exchange Commission. He proposed making Joseph Kennedy its first chairman. Who better to protect American stockholders from men like him? Joe agreed to take on the challenge, and went on to head up the SEC for more than a year. Mandated to put a stop to the manipulation and deception that had brought on the Crash, he would prove himself just the right man for the difficult job.
When the time came for FDR’s reelection push in 1936, Joe remained loyal. Using his own money, he published and distributed a book entitled I’m for Roosevelt. He argued that FDR’s programs had saved the country and capitalism from the Great Depression. It was a sales pitch based on self-interest. By his accounting, the richer you were the more you benefited from FDR’s progressive policies.
The country’s wealthiest Catholic also made a sectarian case for the president. With Roosevelt’s shift to the left branded by a faction of more conservative Democrats—including a resentful Al Smith—as “Communist,” Kennedy defended him in a way that would appeal to his fellow Catholics. He argued that the New Deal programs, especially Social Security, actually had much in common with their own teachings. To reach a wider Catholic audience, including its proud and populous “subway alumni,” he played the Notre Dame card. How, Joe would ask, could a Catholic question the worth of any man to whom, only the year before, that university had awarded an honorary degree, citing his “faith and invincible courage”?
With Roosevelt’s 1936 reelection sweep, winning all but two states, he came to Joseph Kennedy again at the start of 1937, asking him to chair the new U.S. Maritime Commission. The position offered Joe the challenge of building up the country’s merchant marine. It proved another success for both men. By the end of the year, the president realized a greater reward needed to come next. He sent his son James to learn what would satisfy Kennedy, who’d done such loyal service.
Kennedy’s first pick, James reported back, was secretary of the treasury. But if he couldn’t have that, he’d suggested ambassador to England. When FDR heard this, he “laughed so hard he almost toppled from his wheelchair.” He sent his son back with a counteroffer: secretary of commerce. Kennedy turned that down flat.
The tough businessman knew it was time to close the deal. He would accept no appointment but the one on which he and Rose had set their hearts. Confronted with Kennedy’s deal-or-no-deal insistence, Roosevelt agreed. He sent word to immigrant Patrick J. Kennedy’s grandson that he was granting his wish. He was going to be U.S. ambassador to the Court of St. James’s.
It was the reverse of their grandparents’ forced journeys in steerage. Rose and five of her children were now, in triumph, heading across the Atlantic to join her husband in Britain, traveling in the full luxury due a wealthy tycoon’s family. Young Bobby can be glimpsed in a newsreel interview expressing his pleasure at the trip ahead: “This is my first trip to Europe and I am very excited,” he said from the New York pier as they were about to board the SS Manhattan. “I couldn’t even sleep last night!”
Arriving in London, the Kennedys—particularly the golden trio of Joe, Jack, and sister Kathleen (known as “Kick”)—found themselves in a glowing spotlight. Their new circle of upper-crust friends, perhaps enjoying their novelty, kept them out every night. They were the toast of London—in a city where worries of a coming war broke down inhibitions and made for a heightened gaiety. All the time Joe Sr.’s focus remained sharply on his oldest, now twenty-three, giving him the title of his “secretary.” It became the mark of his emerging status.
The younger Kennedy children, entering British classrooms, saw London as a very different city than did their wined-and-dined elder siblings. Bobby, with no voice in the matter, found himself enrolled at the Gibbs School for Boys in Chelsea. Diplomat and Conservative politician David Ormsby-Gore—who first met Jack during this era and would become his lifelong friend—was a witness to how “acutely embarrassed” and unhappy Bobby was by the red cap all Gibbs boys were forced to wear as part of the school uniform.
During these months of 1938, the mood in London was watchful, its fate dangerously poised on the brink. The reality of Adolf Hitler’s menacing rise was each day more unavoidable. Appointed German chancellor only a month before Roosevelt’s first inauguration, he was the dark specter haunting the countries of Europe—and the world beyond. Leader of the increasingly dominant Nazi party, he made his path to power by emphasizing national pride and German identity, and vowing to redress the many grievances of the country’s World War I defeat. His urgent goal was the annexation of lands on his borders, where lived large numbers of ethnic Germans. In order to make this happen, he committed himself to smashing the Versailles Treaty, which in 1919 ended the Great War between Germany and the Allied Powers, and placed postwar restrictions on German armaments.
Just days after the Kennedys established themselves in the ambassadorial residence in Prince’s Gate, Hitler began keeping his promises. Marching into Austria, he bloodlessly claimed it for Germany, throwing the Jewish population there, as Germany’s own was already, into imminent peril.
The new American ambassador seemed more concerned by the newspapers’ reaction than the infamy itself. As far as he was concerned, the banner headlines back home reporting on Hitler’s takeover were intended to spur the American public into accepting a war. Joachim von Ribbentrop—the German ambassador in London who was soon to be appointed his country’s foreign minister—reported on a conversation he’d had with Kennedy. It concerned “the agitation against us in the American press.” Ribbentrop felt that he now had insight into Kennedy’s thinking. He concluded that his “main objective was to keep America out of any conflict in Europe.” In Ribbentrop’s view, Joe Kennedy’s real enemy was what he saw as the war hawk press.
Kennedy soon repeated a similar sentiment to the Third Reich’s new ambassador to America. What Herbert von Dirksen remembered being told was that “it was not so much the fact that we wanted to get rid of the Jews that was so harmful to us, but rather the loud clamor with which we accompanied this purpose. He himself understood our Jewish policy completely.”
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